Blue Pills - Softcover

Frederik Peeters

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0224082396 ISBN 13: 9780224082396

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2008

Synopsis

From one of Europe's best young comics artists, a black-and-white memoir that is an intimate, moving and revelatory exploration of the author’s relationship with his girlfriend and her three-year-old son, both of whom are HIV positive, and what it means to love in the face of daunting obstacles.

About this title

About the Author:

Frederik Peeters was born in 1974 and lives in Geneva, where he’s an established comics artist. BLUE PILLS, which has sold in a number of languages (including Polish and Korean) and been nominated for several prestigious comic book awards, is his most well-known book, and the first to be translated into English. It has sold over 20,000 copies in its original French.

From Publishers Weekly:

Originally published in Switzerland, Peeters's comics memoir of his romance with an HIV-positive woman named Cati (whose young son is also seropositive) is a new and sweeter kind of AIDS narrative-set in the era when HIV has become a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. There's not much of a plot here (the unnamed boy gets sick, then better; Peeters and Cati panic after a condom breaks, and are reassured by their doctor), but the book is much more about Peeters's fluid, slashing, unfailingly evocative ink brushwork documenting the psychological changes he's gone through. Sure-handedly caricatured facial expressions and body language tell a lot of the story, and almost every page is punctuated with a silent panel or two that suggests the way Peeters's newly expanded awareness of his mortality has made him more aware of the world he lives in, too. The final chapters feature an ingenious visual metaphor: after a doctor tells Peeters that he has "as much chance of catching AIDS as you have of running into a white rhinoceros on your way out," he imagines himself stalked everywhere by the rhino. It's a small gem of a book, whose only real flaw is an ungainly English translation, larded with unfiltered Gallicisms.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0224082396
• ISBN 13: 9780224082396
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 190