I hadn’t seen or spoken to him for about five years. After History of Violence came out, he called me and I went to see him. He was a violent person and I have many, very clear, memories of his violence. In The End of Eddy, I showed the complexity of my father. In your first novel, The End of Eddy, you were hard on your father this is a much kinder portrait. And I will fight for them, whether they love me or not. When I write about politics and ask questions, I don’t ask if I love the person I’m writing about or if they love me. But it’s not the point – the violence is the point. I have to admit I don’t know if I love my father or not. Some French editors have defined the book as a love letter to your father. Politicians like Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, Macron… they took political decisions whose impact was as personal and intimate for my father as his first kiss or the first time he made love. The administration contacted my father, whose back had been destroyed, and said: “You have to go back to work”, so he did, as a road sweeper, which destroyed his body even more. When I was very young, perhaps eight, nine, they changed the benefits system in France and started asking people to return to work, whatever the state of their bodies. So th e book is more political than personal? I have tried to restore the truth of this through my father’s story. Politicians like Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron deny this reality. Working-class women are more likely to suffer violence blacks and Arabs are more likely to die. We know if you are a factory worker in France you have a 50% higher chance of dying before 55 compared with executives. Who Killed My Father is the truth about politics and politicians a question, literally, of life and death. This book transmits my anger against that violence. I believe so, in that it describes how the bodies of working-class people are destroyed by the system. Édouard Louis is exactly the kind of writer we need right now: honest, fearless and, yes, tough.When we spoke two years ago, you said this book would be a tragedy. The End of Eddy is heart-crushing, soul-stabbing, astonishing, exhilarating. "Like a cannonball spilled off the side of a ship, Édouard Louis makes straight for the deeps. No one has told this story as eloquently.” -Edmund White, author of A Boy's Own Story " The End of Eddy is lean and poignant and masterfully tells the tale of growing up gay, poor, and bullied. Revelatory, queerly tough, as intellectual as it is impolite, The End of Eddy is a book to shake you up." Justin Torres, author of We the Animals "Èdouard Louis speaks of violence, both social and familiar, with tremendous force and feeling. Louis's remarkably visceral story of growing up queer in working class France quickly transcends its setting precisely because it delivers us into it with such emotional force." -Adam Haslett, author of Imagine Me Gone "A bracingly pitiless account of the psychic and physical violence that lies at the root of masculine identity. The result-a critical and popular triumph-has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.
Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. But from childhood, he was different-“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.Īlready translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. “Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again. About The End of Eddyįarrar, Strauss and Giroux, May 2, 2017, translated by Michael Lucey.Īn autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of "Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive", published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books. He also authored a second novel, Histoire de la violence, and is the editor of a scholarly work on the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
His first novel, The End of Eddy, was an instant best-seller, and got translated into 20 languages. Born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, Édouard Louis is one of the most prominent young voices in the literary French landscape today.
0 kommentar(er)
