The French writer Alexandre Labruffe, who moved to China in 2019, published this Thursday at Verticales "A winter in Wuhan", a documentary account that describes the start of the pandemic, Chinese hospitals in the city where it all began to the recklessness of the French at the start of 2020.

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The discovery of the coronavirus on December 31

In December 209, he broke his rib and had to go to Wuhan hospital.

"I saw lots of masked men and especially a French-speaking Chinese doctor who was not happy to see me," he says, questioned by the attitude of the hospital staff.

"On December 31, through alternative networks, I learned that there was an epidemic in Wuhan but completely unofficially, because the figures were blocked," he recounts.

"I really felt like I was living in

Blade Runner

remixed with

Contagion,

" he slips. 

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"I felt like I was taken for a madman when I spoke of the epidemic"

A few days before the confinement of Wuhan at the end of January, Alexandre Labruffe decided to leave China to go to a literary festival in France.

At that time, France is very far from having realized the situation.

"Finally, I could go out without a mask and I felt like I was taken for a lunatic when I spoke about the epidemic, at least at the beginning," he explains. 

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From there came the idea of 

A winter in Wuhan

, published by Verticales this Thursday, which looks back on the first weeks of a global health crisis.

A hallucinatory story that takes a documentary look at the course of events.

Alexandre Labruffe alternates the memories of his stays there: from 1996 to the fall of 2019 and identifies the micro-apocalypses which "have been the basis of the economic miracle of China for two decades and becomes the hallucinatory witness of a health crisis revealing its liberal nature -totalitarian ", specifies the back cover.