CANR

• Pierre Bourdieu: L'insoumission en héritage Presses Universitaires de France 2013
• Foucault contre lui-même Universitaires de France 2014
• En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule ( novel) Le Seuil (Paris, France), 2014
• Histoire de la violence ( novel) Le Seuil (Paris, France), 2016

• The End of Eddy - 2017 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, NY

• Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/05/03/the-state-of-the-political-novel-an-interview-with-edouard-louis/

  The State of the Political Novel: An Interview with Édouard Louis
  By Ane Farsethås May 3, 2016
  At Work

  Édouard Louis

  Édouard Louis, born in 1992, grew up in Hallencourt, a village in the north of France where many live below the poverty line. Now his account of life in that village, written when he was nineteen, has ignited a debate on class and inequality, foisting Louis into the center of French literary life.

  En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (Finishing off Eddy Bellegueule) is unsparing in its descriptions of the homophobia, alcoholism, and racism that animated Louis’s youth in Hallencourt. “We thought the book would be as invisible as the people it describes,” said Louis, who rejects any romantic views of the “authenticity” of working-class life. His publisher thought the first edition, two thousand copies, would last years. But hundreds of thousands of copies have sold in France, and the book is being translated into more than twenty languages. The novel, which has earned Louis comparisons to Zola, Genet, and de Beauvoir, is set to appear in English later this year.

  Eddy Bellegueule can be read as a straightforward coming-of-age story, but beneath its narrative is an almost systematic examination of the norms and habits of the villagers—inspired, Louis has said, by the theories of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It’s as if he’s taken the whole place and put it behind glass—like observing the inner workings of an anthill.

  Who is Eddy Bellegueule, and why do you want to finish him off?

  Eddy Bellegueule is the name my parents gave me when I was born. It sounds dramatic, but yes, I wanted to kill him—he wasn’t me, he was the name of a childhood I hated. The book shows how—before I revolted against my childhood, my social class, my family, and, finally, my name—it was my milieu that revolted against me. My father and my brothers wanted to finish off Eddy Bellegueule long before, at a time when I was still trying to save him.

  Eddy grows up gay in a world where narrow norms of masculinity are strictly enforced.

  The real subject of the book is how people like the ones in my village suffer from exclusion, domination, poverty. In the novel, a series of vignettes—scenes taken from real life—expose this, the constant lack of money for food, how my mother would steal wood from the neighbors in order to heat the house, and so on. And it’s clear these circumstances produce brutality through what Pierre Bourdieu called the principle of the conservation of violence. When you’re subjected to endless violence, in every situation, every moment of your life, you end up reproducing it against others, in other situations, by other means. One of the instruments of this daily violence is the cult of masculinity. I always hated typical masculine activities. I was incapable of them—the sight of me playing football was hilarious—and so from the beginning I was excluded. But the book describes how the boy doesn’t want to be different, how he struggles to be like everyone else.

  You were ashamed?

  My father used to say, You are the shame of the family. He would tell me the community mocked our family because I acted like a girl, that I was too flamboyant. So I did all I could to change. Wanting so desperately to fit in made me look at class from a different angle than I’d previously encountered in literature. Even from the greatest writers, I always had the impression that the loners in these kinds of books—the literature of the outsider—were already free. They were always so unique, so gifted, so different from the environment they were predestined to escape. When I read Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin, or Thomas Bernhard, I was unsettled by the impression that these authors had always been so much freer than those around them, how the story of first part of their life always looked like a struggle against the circumstances into which they had accidentally been born. But I never dreamed of fleeing. My dream was that my parents would look me in the eyes.

  I wanted to invert the way the story of the outsider is told. If you say that those who flee have always been different, then you’ll just keep waiting for those individuals to reveal themselves, to set themselves apart. But if you say, Eddy wasn’t born very different, and he certainly did not want to be different, then it’s a story about how this difference is produced—how so much of what we are is created by the words of others.

  You write so unflinchingly about your family.

  Some scenes were difficult to write. I kept thinking, This is too intimate, too personal. But then I would think, That’s precisely what I must write. The rest, no one cares about. When the first gay or feminist movements emerged, conservatives responded by saying that sexuality or the role of women in daily life weren’t proper subjects for political debate. We often dismiss as too intimate those things we prefer to not talk about. Literature must persist in moving this border, to speak of the things society has relegated to silence and privacy.

  Mixed in with the details of the violence you suffered and how you discovered your sexuality, there are chapters with analytical titles like “The Norms of Masculinity”—here the book sounds almost like a sociological survey.

  I really believe you can tap into the deepest emotions by way of knowledge. Think about Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex. She writes in her own voice and relates real stories from women’s lives, but she also brings in history, sociology, even biology. By setting the history of the suffering of women in that larger context, the book was able to effect change. When Eddy cries at school because he was bullied, he thinks his tears are the result of the single wicked act of those who call him a faggot. But to write Eddy was, for me, a means of seeing Eddy’s tears as the product of the entire history of homophobia, of masculine domination, and of social violence which had preceded them. When I wrote it down, I understood that even our tears are political. That’s why this book is both a novel and an analysis. I don’t see any difference.

  In France you’re often referred to as a kind of spokesperson for the working class—but you’ve been criticized for painting an unflattering picture of that very same class.

  I wrote the book to give a voice to these people, to fight for them and with them, because they seem to have disappeared from the public eye. In the novel I use two languages—the one I use now, which is more “literary,” and the one I grew up with, the language of the excluded classes, which is completely absent from the public arena. When you make a language disappear you make the people who speak it disappear. My family would vote for Marine Le Pen, saying, We do it because she’s the only one who talk about us, the little people.” That wasn’t true, but it reveals the sentiment of invisibility that strikes the dispossessed. But I also critique the values of that culture. I don’t need to show that working-class values are above reproach in order to write against the social violence that produces them. To me it’s a crucial distinction—we don’t have to love a culture to support the people who comprise it. For many years we’ve made the mistake of confusing love with politics, as if supporting something politically meant loving everything associated with it, to the point of romanticizing poverty and misery to support the people who endure them. I’ll support prisoners who fight unjust conditions in jail, but that doesn’t mean I want to have dinner with them every day.

  Were you concerned with aestheticizing violence, given how violent the novel is?

  The book opens with a scene from when I started middle school. Two kids in the hallway begin bullying Eddy, harassing him, spitting on him. When I wrote it, I thought of a famous scene in Jean Genet’s The Miracle of the Rose, where he’s in jail and some guy spits on him. Genet says the spit was like a rose. It struck me when I read it. It was as if in order to write literature, you’d have to make things beautiful, even violence. But I think it’s possible to create works of beauty without creating an aesthetic of violence. Similarly, I don’t buy the idea that the life of the poor is true because it’s so authentic. But there’s a long history of this attitude, even in the finest literature and art. Pasolini, for example, who I’ve learned so much from in other respects, was always praising the beauty of the lives of the working class, creating a fantasy out of poverty and misery. But Pasolini never lived that life. The perception of the beauty and authenticity of the working class is created at an enormous distance. It can be interpreted as a way of saying to people, Stay where you are. You’re starving, but you’re so authentic.

  EdouardLouis1

  Eddy’s short, simple sentences communicate emotional impact very directly—“I have no happy memories from childhood”—but the passages where villagers’ speech is set in italics. Why did you separate the voices?

  Because those languages are separated in real life. I wanted to point out that these two languages are created in relation to each other by mutual exclusion. The greatest literary works have been important because they managed to include what had been excluded from literature—think of the lives of black Americans in Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison, or gay lives in André Gide. It seemed to me that the most striking absence in contemporary literature was the people from the world I grew up in. It’s not even the working class, who are more often represented in literature, but those who Marx called the Lumpenproletariat. I wanted to show what the world looks like through their eyes. In Finishing off Eddy, my mother refers to the people who work at the factories as “bourgeois,” because they receive a salary every month and have a retirement pension, and the teacher in the village we saw as an aristocrat. That was how the world looked to us.

  Your revitalization of the political novel has been compared to Zola’s. Who do you see as your literary ancestors and inspirations?

  I actually hadn’t read Zola before I finished Eddy Bellegueule. But William Faulkner has been very important to me, as have Toni Morrison and James Baldwin and the French philosopher and sociologist Didier Eribon. I am fascinated by the enormous political potential in their books. When I say my writing is political, I don’t mean that it strives to deliver a message—rather, that it’s a literary form forged through politics. Using the language of the working class is political because I’m trying to make literature out of non-literature.

  In France, there’s been this ideal for a long time now of moving literature as far away from political realities as possible. For most writers, to intervene in politics would constitute a violation of the purity of literature. I find that the urgent subjects—domination, violence, pain, truth, love—are most often addressed in American and Scandinavian literature. I read Karl Ove Knausgaard and the radical shock of his form inspired me. His revolution was setting his own standard for what a well-made novel might be. I’ve tried to do something similar with the language of my childhood, a language usually considered to be the opposite of “style.” Some have claimed that I’ve just written down what people have said and that that cannot be art. But those were some of the hardest parts to write. How do you find a rhythm in this language, how do you choose what works as a sentence in a book? I think a novel should be bold enough to attempt to define its own construction in a new way. One of the revolutions in modern art was using materials that had previously been excluded—plastic, paper, broken bottles, glass, garbage—to make art out of non-art. When I wrote Eddy, that was my idea—not to rely on refined materials, but to use moments of my childhood like discarded bits of paper, plastic, glass, and try to make art out of them.

  What writers inspire you?

  Right now something’s happening around the idea of truth in literature. It’s not only the way Knausgaard has reshaped the novel, but also the way Svetlana Alexievich uses real testimonies to make a unique literary form. I think this kind of truth-oriented literature can help us move beyond some of the ingrained prejudices. When Eddy came out, there were people who didn’t believe this sort of violence and misery existed in France. They wanted proof that what I had written was factually true. But there were also some who defended me by claiming that the truth doesn’t matter, because it’s literature. I felt stuck between them. If we believe that literature obviates any question of truth, we create a literature that actually prevents us from asking important questions, from talking about the world we live in.

  So political literature is inescapable for you?

  All authors are political, even if they don’t realize it. Being apolitical merely reinforces the status quo, supporting the powerful over the weak. Many writers don’t want to know how to speak about politics because they’re from the bourgeoisie, and they’ve been protected from the rough edges of political change. The people I write about are ceaselessly marked by the consequences of political choices. My mother would say, Under Mitterand, we always had meat on our plates. Even if I could show her that Mitterand wasn’t as generous to the poor as she thought, the point is that when the government reformed its policies—on welfare, for example—we felt it in our stomachs. Today I can complain about the government all I want, but political decisions won’t determine the amount of food on my plate tonight. Politics isn’t a question of words, it’s a question of meat. I try never to forget that.

  You’ve been embraced by these same cultural elites, though—the ones living at a comfortable distance from political consequences.

  I could say I just don’t take part—but that would be terribly naive. It’s what apolitical writers say—I don’t belong to any class. So that’s not what I want to say. When I arrived in Paris, I remember I dreamed about going to all these cocktail parties and dinners. But more and more I realize you can see the literary world as a school of submission. You always have to shake everyone’s hand, in what can be seen as a quiet celebration of the bourgeoisie. I guess this uncomfortable paradox in which I find myself, the separation between the world of my childhood and the world I inhabit today, is what gives me the strength to write, and thus to fight.

  Ane Farsethås is a critic and editor at Morgenbladet, a Norwegian newspaper, and the author of a book on contemporary Norwegian literature, From Here to Reality.

• London Observer - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/19/interview-edouard-louis-the-end-of-eddy-front-national-marine-le-pen-kim-willsher

  French literary boy wonder Édouard Louis on saving the working class from Marine Le Pen

  His bestselling novel about growing up gay in a violent, neglected town in northern France sparked a national debate. A month from the presidential election, the young writer issues a furious challenge to leftwing politicians
  Edouard Louis photographed in Paris by Arnaud Delrue
  Edouard Louis photographed in Paris. Photograph: Arnaud Delrue

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  Kim Willsher

  Sunday 19 March 2017 09.30 GMT
  Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 18.23 BST

  Growing up in gritty, post-industrial northern France, Édouard Louis learned as a boy that politics was about more than putting a cross in a box. As his mother struggled to deal with his unemployed and frequently drunk father and feed the family of five on little money, she would lament the days of better leaders. “When the left was in power, we had steak on our plates,” she would tell her son.

  Today, Louis, whose account of his escape from a violent, joyless childhood has made him a bestselling author, can have steak any day he chooses. Back in his home town, meanwhile, just six weeks from a presidential election, his parents, like much of France’s underclass, are heeding the siren call of the poor’s new perceived champion, Marine Le Pen, and her promises of plenty in a France for the French.
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  Far from making him turn away from his background, Louis’s access to the literary beau monde of Paris has heightened his belief that politics remains a curse for what his mother would call the “poor, small folk”.

  “The word politics means different things to different social classes. How can politics create a better life if the individuals who create those politics are so lightly touched by its effects, if politics doesn’t strike them in the way that it would strike the people of my childhood?” he asks.

  “In the lower classes, politics has always been a matter of life and death. My parents were desperate at the idea of losing some badly needed social benefit, which might make the difference between whether we could go to the dentist. I was 15 when my father went to the dentist for the first time because the government created a new health benefit.

  Each time I heard Eddy, I heard 'poverty', 'homo'. That's how it started – with my first name

  “On the day when the amount of the allowance at the start of the school year was raised, my father, with a joy we rarely saw because he usually played at being the man of the house who could not show his feelings, shouted: ‘Sunday, we’re going to the seaside.’ And indeed we went, six of us in a car big enough for five. I rode in the boot.

  “All during my childhood, politics could change anything. Our lives beat to the rhythm of politics. It was like a storm that hung over those lives. an adult, I found the same storm was not present for those in the better-off classes.”

  That is a powerful theme of his first book, The End of Eddy, published last month in the UK, in which Louis describes his childhood among a “dominated” social class overlooked by the cultural and political elite, a disregard, he says, that has led directly to the rise of the far right.

  This autobiographical novel came out in France in 2014 when Louis was 21, and was an instant hit, selling more than 300,000 copies. and sparking an anxious debate in France around class, poverty, social and sexual inequality and racism. It has been translated into several languages and was shortlisted for the prestigious Goncourt literary prize. He wrote it, he says, to give a voice to the working class and to “fight for them and with them because they seem to have disappeared from the public eye.”
  The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis review – a childhood in hell
  This autobiographical novel about growing up amid poverty and homophobia in rural France is essential reading
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  Set in Hallencourt in the Somme, a small and isolated factory town of 1,300 people where Louis grew up, the book is a stark tale of his life below the poverty line, punctuated by his father’s drunken violence – the rage of the humiliated working-class male: racism, homophobia and casual daily brutality.

  Eddy Bellegueule (Louis’s real name, which means “beautiful face” in French) is an effeminate child; as a “faggot”, “queer”, “poof”, as he is regularly reminded, he is even worse than an “Arab”, “Jew” or “black”.

  Another oft-repeated phrase – “just who do you think you are?” – serves to remind him who he is, where he comes from and where everyone assumes he is going. Instead, Bellegueule forges a new path, via a scholarship and one of France’s elite university schools, writes everything down and changes his name.

  “Each time I heard ‘Eddy’, I heard ‘poverty’, ‘homo’. That’s how it started. With my first name. He was poor and he was a poof,” Louis says.
  Édouard Louis: ‘For my family, a book was a kind of assault’
  Édouard Louis
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  It was a “huge shock” to come to Paris and discover the curse of politics did not afflict those who were better off, he says: “Among the Parisian bourgeois, I realised that politics is absolutely not about life or death, about being able to eat and afford medical care or not; that whatever the government right or left does will not stop them living, eating. And because the bourgeoisie is the dominant class everywhere in the world, there is a kind of amnesia about what politics means to other people. Whatever happens, no government is going to radically change their lives as it does for the poor and dominated.”

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  Sitting in a cafe near the Left Bank of the Seine, Louis speaks with controlled fury. Under the table, his leg is twitching, like a physical manifestation of an internal struggle between the desire to conform and the urge to leap up and rail at the world.

  “In the village I grew up in, 50-55% of people vote FN [Front National]. Thank goodness for abstention, because otherwise the figure would be 70-75%. These people support the FN because they’re excluded, dominated, poor and abandoned. My mother used to say she voted FN and for Marine Le Pen because “she is the only one who speaks to us”.

  “Today I don’t want to insult Marine Le Pen, I want to attack Manuel Valls [former prime minister] and François Hollande for putting my father in this situation. I accuse them directly. When I see my father voting for Le Pen, I am revolted by the current government and its failings. Of course, I’m revolted by the right, but I never expected the right to do anything for the lower classes, but the left… the left has stopped speaking about poverty, misery and exclusion. People talk about Le Pen winning the presidential [race], but the FN has been winning for the last 20 years because the left that should be representing people like my mother has abandoned them.

  “I’m astonished at the feeble level of discussion that tries to explain the extreme right vote or the FN. Instead of inventing a new debate, people are falling back on historic explanations and errors, saying, ‘people live in misery, but it’s not just poverty; misery means so much more, it’s anguish about your place in the world. Take the person who plays the triangle in the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, the lowest of the orchestra hierarchy; it’s no good saying, ‘fter all it is the Berlin Philharmonic, the best in the world, if, within their world, the triangle player feels the lowest of the low.

  “My father lives in the village where my grandfather and great-grandfather lived. He worked in the factory where my grandfather and great-grandfather worked. My mother left school at 14, my brothers and sisters also. Nobody is giving people like them a way out of their prison, their misery.
  Marine Le Pen on the campaign trail. ‘Even the most ridiculous thing she says makes headlines,’ says Edouard Louis
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  Marine Le Pen on the campaign trail. ‘Even the most ridiculous thing she says makes headlines,’ says Edouard Louis. Photograph EPA/Arnold Jerocki

  “This social hierarchy, the dominated and the dominant, is in itself a violence. People say to me, ‘Ah, but you managed to escape,’ but to me that doesn’t show it’s possible – quite the opposite. Now I’m out, I can see how difficult it is to escape. I can see the extraordinary violence of it… and who speaks for these people whose lives are shattered, who are humiliated by the system? These people feel forgotten, so they turn to someone. In France’s case, Marine Le Pen, who they think is listening and who they believe will make life better for them.”
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  Louis is equally angry about what he sees as the “global fascination with the extreme right” that has hijacked the news agenda and made everyone a prisoner of the far-right discourse. “Even the most ridiculous thing said by Marine Le Pen or Nigel Farage makes headlines, while anyone who is young, who is trying to invent a new discourse, is ignored. It’s a shrinking democracy: the right speaks to the right, the left speaks to the right, where is the left’s discourse? What’s even more dramatic is that the whole world is speaking the language of the extreme right; Marine Le Pen is imposing the language, the subjects we talk about.

  “My friends go and debate with the FN on television, but I say no. I will not legitimise their issues by responding. Twenty years ago nobody listened to them or their views because they were considered so outdated.”

  He adds: “Silence has to be a part of our progress. We have to put silence at the centre of politics today. Stop responding to the questions, stop letting them control the language, the debate, the agenda. I hear some argue it’s better to be open about these things. If you are racist and hide your racism, then you’re a hypocrite. I say no, it’s better you keep quiet.

  “To me, democracy is not about saying everything. Some things, like racism, antisemitism, shouldn’t be issues, they shouldn’t be talked about. Some subjects should be considered obsolete, and yes, let’s shut down the debate because they are obsolete. I grew up as a queer child in a small village. Lots of gay children in this situation suffer the same things: being threatened, beaten up. When I published my book in Paris, some said, ‘Well, if you’d grown up in a bourgeois milieu, people would have thought the same thing, they just wouldn’t have hit you.’ Are they joking? I would rather that, than being constantly beaten up for being queer. Of course I’d rather people weren’t racist or homophobic, but if they are they can keep it to themselves. Just shut up.
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  “And if they don’t and won’t, we need to start redistributing shame, making people feel ashamed, so when they repeat what the FN is saying, we reply, ‘Quelle honte!’ [Shame on you]. That would be progress, that would be democracy, not letting people say what they want, not giving their racist, homophobic views the same value, the same credibility as other propositions. Not giving those stupid, unacceptable propositions weight and currency by responding to them. This has been the great tragedy of recent years in literature, the press, intellectual life, this ideology that in a debate all views have the same weight, that we can debate with the FN, with the extreme right. That’s wrong.

  “We should say to the FN and far right: just shut up. Keep your stupid, nasty views to yourselves. This shame business is quite important.

  “Today, we see the far right vote and we understand there is racism, of exclusion of poverty of violence around the world, but when we speak of it, we are always accused of exaggerating. Primo Levi spoke of the concentration camps and how the Nazis would tell prisoners that, even if they did escape, nobody would believe them. Nobody would believe what had been done. It is the difficulty in transmitting the truth of violence.”

  Last year, Louis, who has been compared to the Norwegian autobiographical novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, published his second book, Histoire de la Violence (story of violence), based on an incident when he was throttled and raped by an Algerian man he picked up in the street on Christmas Eve. Again, he examines questions of class and culture. A few hours after we meet, he is flying to the United States to talk about film projects and visit Dartmouth College, which has made him a fellow. He is working on his third book, which he says will be “a tragedy”.

  Relations with his family back in Hallencourt are strained. His mother was furious that he had described them as “poor” in The End of Eddy. Louis says the difficulty is they do not speak the same language, so conversations are like “treading on eggshells, trying not to say something that will hurt”.

  The search for a common language is a challenge for his writing too, he says. “I ask myself, how can we write about the dominated without using the language of the bourgeoisie, who have the advantages, or the language of my childhood, the language that called me a poor faggot, the language that was no friend of mine but a language of violence. For me, that is the challenge: how to find a new voice, a new way of speaking.

  “As a writer, every single line I write is intended as a reminder to the dominant class, not to forget that for most individuals like my parents, like refugees, politics is still a question of life and death. We must put that idea of life and death back in the centre of politics.”

  • Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• Wikipedia -

  Édouard Louis
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Édouard Louis
  Edouard Louis at Columbia University.jpg
  Édouard Louis at Columbia University, 2014
  Born Eddy Bellegueule
  October 10, 1992 (age 24)
  Picardie, France
  Occupation Writer
  Language French
  Alma mater École Normale Supérieure
  École des hautes études en sciences sociales
  Genre Novel, drama; Non-Fiction, Sociology

  Édouard Louis (born Eddy Bellegueule;[1] October 30, 1992)[2] is a French writer.

  Contents

  1 Biography
  2 Style and Influences
  3 Works
  3.1 Novels
  3.2 Non-Fiction
  4 Awards
  5 Notes and references
  6 External links

  Biography

  Édouard Louis, born Eddy Bellegueule[1] was born and raised in the town of Hallencourt in the North of France, which is the setting of his first novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (published in English as The End of Eddy).

  Louis grew-up in a poor family supported by government welfare: his father was a factory worker for a decade until "a weight fell on him and destroyed his back"[3] and he became unemployed; his mother found occasional work bathing the elderly.[4] The poverty, racism and alcoholism which confronted him during his childhood would become the subject of his literary work.[5]

  He is the first in his family to attend university, and in 2011 he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure[6]and to the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences[7] in Paris. In 2013, he officially changed his name to Édouard Louis.[8]

  The same year, he edited the collective work, Pierre Bourdieu. L'insoumission en héritage, which analyses the influence of Pierre Bourdieu on critical thinking and political emancipation.[9]

  In 2014 he published En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, an autobiographical novel. The book was the subject of extensive media attention and was hailed for its literary merit and compelling story. The book also gave rise to debate and controversy over the perception of the working class.[10] It was a bestseller in France and has been translated to over 20 languages.[11][12]

  In September 2015, Edouard Louis penned a Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive alongside philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie.[13] In the letter, which ran on the front page of Le Monde, and was later reprinted in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books, Louis and Lagasnerie denounce the legitimization of right-wing agendas in public discourse and establish principles by which leftist intellectuals should reengage in public debate.[14][15]

  In 2016, Louis published his second novel, History of Violence.[16] In recounting the story of his rape and attempted murder on Christmas Eve of 2012, the autobiographical novel centers around the cyclical and self-perpetuating nature of violence in society.[17][18]
  Style and Influences

  The work of Édouard Louis maintains a fine link with sociology: the presence of Pierre Bourdieu pervades his novels which invoke the themes of social exclusion, domination, and poverty.[19] The influence of William Faulkner is also revealed through Louis' superposition in the same sentence of various levels of language – placing the popular vernacular at the heart of his writing.[20] Furthermore, Louis' novel Histoire de la violence contains an essay on Faulkner's novel Sanctuary. The author says that, by working languages, he wants to use violence as a literary subject, "I want to make violence a literary space, like Marguerite Duras made a literary space of madness or as Claude Simon made war into a literary space, or as Hervé Guibert did with sickness."[21]

  The greatest contemporary influence on Louis comes from French sociologist Didier Eribon, whose book "Returning to Reims" Louis says, "marked a turning point for his future as a writer."[22] He has also included James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir amongst "the writers who have meant the most to me".[3]
  Works
  Novels

  En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule. Le Seuil. 2014. ISBN 9782021117707.

  (published in English as The End of Eddy. Translated by Lucey, Michael. Harvill Secker. 2 February 2017. ISBN 978-1846559006.)

  Histoire de la violence. Le Seuil. 2016. ISBN 2021177785.

  Non-Fiction

  Pierre Bourdieu. L'insoumission en héritage, Édouard Louis (editor), Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon, Arlette Farge, Frédéric Lordon, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie et Frédéric Lebaron, (Presses Universitaires de France, 2013; ISBN 978-2-13-061935-2)
  Foucault contre lui-même ["Foucault against himself"]: François Caillat (editor), Édouard Louis (director), avec Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Arlette Farge, Didier Eribon, (Presses Universitaires de France, 2014; ISBN 978-2-13-063289-4)

  Awards

  2014 : Pierre Guénin Prize against homophobia and for equal rights, for his work En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule.

• Financial Times - https://www.ft.com/content/e0e61bbc-13aa-11e7-80f4-13e067d5072c

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  Far-right village to literary Paris — the rise of Edouard Louis
  The literary sensation talks about his radical reinvention and growing up thinking vegetables were for ‘pussies’
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  March 31, 2017

  by: John Sunyer
  © James Ferguson

  Edouard Louis saunters into the restaurant looking the archetypal university student in jeans and bashed-up trainers. It’s well past midday but the radical 24-year-old French writer has only just woken up, and says he doesn’t fancy lunch.
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  “Un café s’il vous plait,” he signals to the waiter.

  I’m excited and nervous to be meeting Louis. Excited, because even coming after Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante it’s difficult to find a literary sensation that has transfixed so many readers in the same way his extraordinary debut novel The End of Eddy has. Nervous, because the life of Eddy is horrible, especially when you know that everything in the book is real.

  The portrait Louis paints of Hallencourt, his childhood village of 1,300 people in a gritty, post-industrial area of northern France, is grim. Domestic violence, racism, no jobs, too much booze and attitudes based on ignorance and fear. Over half the locals support the far-right Front National.

  To say that the author — a weedy gay kid, accused of “fancy ways” — is at odds with this environment would be an understatement. In the book’s 192 pages Eddy is regularly beaten, mocked and spat on by locals for whom being a “faggot, fag, fairy, cocksucker, punk, pansy, sissy, wimp, girly boy, pussy, bitch, homo, fruit, poof, queer or homosexual” is worse than being an “Arab”, “black” or “Jew”.

  Then there’s his home life. The family lacks money for food and sometimes depend on handouts. Rain enters the house through holes in walls. His father, who becomes unemployed, is one of the hard men of the village and drinks very large quantities of red wine from very large boxes; his mother is naive; both of them are racist.

  Upon publication in France in 2014, the book sold 300,000-plus copies within a year, was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt literary award for debut novels, and subsequently translated into more than 20 languages (including into English last month). Its author, then an unknown 21-year-old, also caused uproar. Debate raged over whether Louis had misrepresented his working-class background. French media descended on the village to try and determine fact from fiction and whether semi-rural France really had such a violent underbelly. His brother went looking for him with a baseball bat; his mother appeared on national TV to challenge his version of events; Louis responded by publishing photos of their home online.

  “When I sent the manuscript of the book to a bunch of publishers, they told me, ‘Look, we can’t take this because nobody in France lives in such poverty’,” Louis explains, sipping his coffee. “It was a typical reaction. But these publishers grew up in the nice areas of Paris and went to good universities. I don’t think these kinds of people don’t want to talk about poverty, it’s because they aren’t even aware it exists.”

  ***

  Louis’s still not feeling hungry. He limits himself to one meal a day, he tells me, “always at night”. Alarmed by the prospect of a Lunch with the FT that doesn’t involve any food, I urge him to look at the menu anyway. We’re sitting in the glass conservatory of Pavillon Montsouris, a quintessentially Parisian restaurant in the 14th arrondissement, looking out on to a pretty manicured park.

  “I’ll have something,” he says without conviction. Barely glancing at the menu, he orders a vegetable salad from the list of starters. It’s too early for wine, he says, “though the fact that I drink [wine] is one of the only common things between me and my father”.

  Undeterred, I order a glass of red and the biggest steak on the menu, followed by framboise en éclair. “The desserts here are very beautiful,” he concedes. So I persuade him to order one for himself. “OK, I’ll take the tarte tatin.”

  While the book’s gruesomeness is unrelenting, it was also written as a fierce challenge to his country’s political left. In the weeks leading up to the French presidential election, Louis’s views seem more prescient than ever.

  “The left stopped talking about poverty as though it doesn’t exist,” Louis says. “[Former prime minister] Manuel Valls, François Hollande and all the others on the left should be representing people like my mother and father, but instead they have abandoned them.”

  With neither embarrassment nor rebuke, Louis tells me that both his parents support the Front National. “My father would actually accompany my siblings to the voting station to make sure they voted for Marine Le Pen,” he says. His mother, no slave to human biology, is supporting her “because she has balls”.

  I ask him to elaborate. “She [Le Pen] has the physiology of a woman but she promotes all the conventional masculine values of order, strength and repression. She’s a social construct.”

  Our food arrives. Louis pops a cherry tomato into his mouth and leans back in his chair, closing his eyes. Is he all right?

  “Growing up, I didn’t eat fruit and vegetables. My father said they were for ‘pussies’. I was 16 when I had my first tomato, can you believe? But wow wow wow wow wow it was worth the wait. So delicious.”

  I fork a mouthful of steak and tack back to the sweeping appeal of the far right. “When you are bourgeois, you have two lives: you have your everyday life, and you also see yourself on TV, in books, in the media, in the arts. But people like my mother, like my father — they are dismissed as if they don’t exist. Sadly, only the Front National have recognised this; only they pretend to talk about her.”

  He continues: “I’m revolted by the right, but then I would never expect them to do anything for the poor. I tell my mother, ‘Le Pen’s against your interests,’ but she doesn’t listen. Le Pen is against abortion, for example, yet my mother has had three and my sister has had two. I don’t know how abortion is viewed in England but, at least for the working class in France, it doesn’t have to be a trauma. If you cannot afford to keep the child, you just do it.”

  How, I ask, does he think Le Pen will get on in the elections? “She makes more than 50 per cent of the vote in the village where I grew up. And I’m sure that if the people who don’t bother voting did, she would make 80 per cent.”

  Although Le Pen is neck-and-neck in the polls in the rest of the country with the 39-year-old independent candidate Emmanuel Macron, Louis thinks she has little chance of winning. “Not this time. Impossible.”

  That’s what people said about Brexit and Trump, I say. “But France has a very different political history. Even if the government has been rightwing in the past, the left was always dominant in literature, media and everywhere else. That’s why we say a rightwing person in France is leftwing in America.”

  He thinks the “terrible” Macron will win. “In a few years it might be Le Pen’s turn, because we are in a bad process where things are changing a lot,” he says. “The left is not so hegemonic any more. It’s time to rebuild.”

  ***

  I’ve made light work of my steak and celeriac mash, and order another glass of wine. Louis, meanwhile, has had two mouthfuls of his salad but allows the waiter to clear away his plate. “Very good but I’m full,” he apologises.

  He has never been a big eater. “So skinny a breeze could blow you away,” his father teased. “Often my family ran out of money. When we had nothing — no meat, potatoes or rice — my mother would say, ‘Tonight, we’ll eat milk’. Of course, you don’t eat milk, you drink it. She was fighting against the reality.”

  Despite all the physical and mental pain he is forced to endure, Louis doesn’t hold anything against the people surrounding him for their violence and neglect: they, too, are victims.

  “A dominant myth in society is that when people are suffering, it is their fault; if they are poor, only they are to blame. My mother believed this too,” Louis says. “For one year after the book was published, she went crazy, giving many interviews and denying everything. She didn’t care that I called her racist or homophobic; more than anything she was ashamed at being called poor. She kept telling me, ‘You’ve betrayed our family. Why did you write this book?’ ”

  I point out that many others have asked the same question. “When I’m writing”, he says, “I think about how women, queers, black and Arabic people are assaulted and made to suffer on a daily basis.”

  Not afraid to tell it like it is, he adds, “Anyway, I don’t write for maman and papa. I won’t let the conservative ideology of the family stand in the way. What is this, the 18th century?”
  Pavillon Montsouris
  20 rue Gazan, Paris

  Assiette végétarienne €15

  Filet de boeuf €41

  Tarte tatin €9

  Framboise en éclair €14

  Verre de Lacombe

  Médoc x 2 €15

  Café x 2 €10

  Total (including tax and service) €104

  I wonder aloud what his family would make of this restaurant and its spacious, white-clothed tables occupied by Parisian elites and business types. Louis grimaces. About a year ago, he says, he treated his mother to a meal at the “fancy restaurant” at the top of Montparnasse Tower.

  “It was stupid of me. She felt ashamed the moment she walked into this bourgeois restaurant with men and women all smartly dressed in suits and ties and dresses. She went up to all the people in the restaurant, right up to their tables, to say hello. She wanted to be polite. She wanted to show me she was educated. And it was so tragic. Sociologically tragic. I was embarrassed. And now I am ashamed for being embarrassed.”

  As if to symbolise his new lifestyle, a trayful of elaborate desserts arrives. Mine has at least three types of fluffy raspberry mousse resting on two huge éclairs, themselves filled with a delicious crème pâtissière, while there’s also just enough room on the plate for crunchy white chocolate shards, micro herbs and a raspberry sorbet. And then there’s his tarte tatin along with a dainty selection of petits fours.

  Louis blows out his cheeks. “So much! So pretty!”

  Relations with his family are difficult. “My brother came to Paris with a baseball bat wanting to kill me,” he says, his voice lowering. “My publisher had to find me somewhere to stay for a few days.” The reaction from the village was equally violent. “I still can’t go back.”

  Unexpectedly, his father has been more positive. Louis escaped the village when he was 14, via a scholarship to a good high school in the largest city in the area (rather than wowing the interviewer with his brains, he begged him to take him on); then, after years of seriously hard work, on to one of Paris’s elite universities, the École Normale Supérieure.

  For one year after the book was published, my mother went crazy. She said, “You’ve betrayed our family”

  During these years, he barely spoke to his father. “Total silence, in fact, between the ages of 17 and 21. He didn’t miss me, I didn’t miss him. But when the book came out, he phoned me and said, ‘I’m so proud of you’. He told me he had bought 20 copies of the book to give to his friends. Which was a big deal, because there were no books in my house growing up. I didn’t read a book until I was 17. We hated them. They made us feel embarrassed. For the first time as well he called me Edouard.”

  Louis was christened Eddy Bellegueule — “a working class, tough guy’s name,” he says — but changed his name as part of his escape from his past. “Whenever I heard the name, I heard ‘faggot’.” He also had surgery on his jaw and his teeth following years of neglect, ditched his rude-boy tracksuits for shirts and jeans, started talking and walking differently and practised his laugh in front of the mirror for “day after day until it sounded like me”.

  “It was my way of telling my family, ‘I am not like you any more’,” he says. “As well as the misery and the violence, I wanted The End of Eddy to be a manifesto for change. There is beauty in metamorphosis, in not being what society tries to force you to be.”

  Does he ever miss his family? “Not really,” he says matter-of-factly. “Sometimes I worry my transformation was maybe too sudden, too violent, putting me too close to the bourgeoisie. But when I arrived in Paris I had to create my own life. Now I have a group of five people; my new family. They mean everything to me. When I’m sick, they take care of me. When they’re sick, I take care of them. We go on vacation, we do Christmas, we do New Year. To have them and a biological family would be too difficult to handle. But my writing keeps me connected to my past, I suppose.”

  All of his “new family” happen to be writers. Why is that? “In terms of literary creation, it’s very important to create groups of solidarity, groups of creation. I have friends who are writers too, like Zadie Smith. I see these people, I talk with them, and that makes me stronger.”

  The success of The End of Eddy continues to spread — there are rumours of a film adaptation; a play based on the book recently premiered in Budapest — while his follow-up Histoire de la violence is just out in France. The book, which largely takes place over the space of a few hours, takes a dramatic turn as its main protagonist — Louis — is sexually assaulted by an Algerian man. “Both books are part of the same project.”
  Related article
  The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis — ‘frank, provocative and compelling’

  An intensely autobiographical debut novel tells the story of an outsider in northern France

  It’s a project, he says, that is far more “political” than that of Knausgaard, a writer with whom he is invariably compared. “There’s something important going on between truth and literature at the moment, and Knausgaard is a part of that, but I’m more interested in the relationship between literature and politics. I think I’m closer to writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, Svetlana Alexievich and one of my heroes Toni Morrison.”

  Louis pauses, and has a rare bite of his dessert. I notice someone is pointing at him from a nearby table, and ask how he deals with his notoriety. “Sometimes it can be a little heavy, a little tough. But I’m not like Beyoncé or Harry Potter, it’s not unbearable. The change in my life is all good.”

  One last question: if he has children one day would he like them to be as radical as he is? “Yes. But I can’t have books and children. Writing takes too much time. I don’t know how you can be a good parent when you’re a writer.”

  You’d need to have three meals a day, I say. “And wake up before midday! I can’t imagine it. I mean, I don’t go to bed until three.”

  John Sunyer is a commissioning editor on FT Life & Arts

  Illustration by James Ferguson

  This article has been amended since publication.

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/11/edouard-louis-books-assult-elite-working-classes-culture

  Édouard Louis: ‘For my family, a book was a kind of assault’

  The French literary sensation and debut author of The End of Eddy on growing up without books
  Édouard Louis
  ‘Literature was not something we paid any attention to’ … Édouard Louis Photograph: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

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  Édouard Louis

  Saturday 11 February 2017 11.00 GMT
  Last modified on Monday 8 May 2017 16.37 BST

  A few months ago, I found myself in a taxi from the airport in Paris, having returned from Japan, where I had been to promote my first novel, The End of Eddy. We had driven a few kilometres when the driver, a tall man from Ivory Coast, asked me what I did. I can never bring myself to answer that I’m a writer; I’m too afraid of seeming arrogant or of giving the impression that I’m trying to hawk my books. Most of the time, I’ll say I’m a literature student, and that’s how I answered on this occasion. “Oh,” he said, “so that’s the kind of thing that interests you, books?” I said yes. He went on, “You know, myself, I don’t read books. But I can tell you one thing, I’ve noticed that in France, when they give out literary prizes, the Goncourt and all the others, they pretty much only give them to white people who write about white people. Have you noticed? Everything is for white people.”

  I nodded in agreement. I learned a long time ago to keep my face expressionless, and I’m sure that the driver could not see the effect that his remark had produced in me. He had stated something so obvious, and yet something I had never been able to articulate quite so clearly: even without reading, even without any contact with books, this man understood that literature and its institutions, the system it was part of, didn’t only know nothing about lives like his, it actively excluded them. His words had taken me abruptly back in time 15 years, to my childhood.
  The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis review – growing up gay in a bigoted French village
  This autobiographical novel is a candid account of a boy’s painful coming of age in a deprived rural community
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  I was born in a small village in the north of France, where up until the beginning of the 1980s a local factory employed almost all the inhabitants. By the time I was born, in the 1990s, after several waves of layoffs, many inhabitants were out of work and doing their best to survive on welfare. My father and mother quit school at the ages of 15 and 16, as had my grandparents before them and as would my younger brother and sister. My father worked at the factory for 10 years, until a weight fell on him and destroyed his back. My mother didn’t work; my father insisted a woman’s place was at home taking care of the children.

  Literature was not something we paid any attention to – quite the opposite. On television we would see that literary prizes went mostly to books that did not speak of us, and in any case, just like the taxi driver, we were aware that, prize or no prize, books in general took no interest in our lives. My mother would say it over and over: us, the little folks, no one is interested in us. It was the feeling of being invisible in the eyes of other people that drove her to vote for Marine Le Pen, as did most of my family. My mother would say: she’s the only one who talks about us. The Front National got more than 50% of the vote in the village where I was born, and that vote was above all, beyond racism, beyond anything else, a desperate attempt to exist, to be noticed by others.
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  Many of the authors who have meant the most to me, such as James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir or Didier Eribon, wrote about the liberating effect of literature in powerful ways that continue to affect new generations of readers. Yet however different Baldwin’s childhood was from De Beauvoir’s, mine was like neither of theirs: in my childhood, there were no books. My parents have never read a book in their lives; there wasn’t a single book in our house. For us, a book was a kind of assault: it represented a life we would never have, the life of people who pursue an education, who have time to read, who have gone to university and had an easier time of it than us.

  As for school itself, that experience had driven my parents out of the education system and denied them access to culture at the age when middle-class children were just beginning their studies. Culture, the education system, books had all given us a feeling of rejection: in return, we rejected them. If culture paid us no attention, we would have our revenge. We despised it. It should never be said that the working classes reject culture, but rather that culture rejects the working classes, who reject it in turn. It should never be said that the working classes are violent, but rather that the working classes suffer from violence on a daily basis, and because of that they reproduce this violence by, for example, voting for the Front National. The domination comes first; those in positions of dominance are always responsible.

  I am more aware than some of the violence that literature can represent, because at a certain point in my life, I made use of that violence to hurt the people around me. Thanks to a series of accidents and failures, I made it into a lycée and then to university. I was the first person in my family to do this. During the week I would board at school or stay with friends, so I would only spend weekends with my parents. As soon as I walked into the house, I would sit on the sofa with a book, one that, most of the time, I would only be pretending to read. I wanted to let my family know that I wasn’t like them, that I no longer belonged to the same world as them, and I knew that a book would be the most violent instrument I could use to do that.
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  Today, authors such as Zadie Smith work obstinately to invent a more welcoming and inclusive literature. Photograph: Dominique Nabokov/barclayagency.com

  Today, all I feel is shame when I think back: shame in the face of my brutality and arrogance. But at the time I didn’t think, I was just trying to get away. I was too proud to have escaped from my family’s social circumstances; I was an obnoxious fool. In the evenings, our meals would nearly always end in arguments. I would be speaking and my mother would interrupt: stop talking like a damn book, you’ve got nothing to teach me. She would say this with a mixture of anger, sadness and disgust. I, on the other hand, would hear her remarks as compliments: finally I belonged to the world where people read books.

  Rather than saving us, books were what kept us down. A book by Hemingway was much more violent, from our point of view, than a photo of Trump in his enormous gold-covered living room. The photo would have left us dreaming of gold and riches: my mother spent hours looking at pictures of huge houses on the glossy pages of magazines. The Hemingway, by contrast, gave us nothing to dream of: it would have left us feeling defeated.

  Are books doomed to reproduce such social barriers? There is one counterexample among my memories. A little while after my trip to Japan, I was invited to give a talk in Oslo about an author I loved. I chose Toni Morrison. When I walked into the room I was struck by the large proportion of black women in the audience. I spoke with many of them after the event: some had read Morrison, others hadn’t – but all of them felt welcomed by her books. They knew that novels such as Jazz or Home were addressed to them – not to them only, but above all to them. Today, authors such as Zadie Smith, Ta‑Nehisi Coates and a few others work obstinately to invent a more welcoming and more inclusive literature. I don’t mean to suggest that Morrison publishing a book is sufficient to interrupt the reproduction of the social order or social inequality. But at least literature will have done its job; it remains for the politicians to do theirs.

  My books are born out of an absence: I began writing because I could not find the world of my childhood anywhere in books. We had not had the good fortune to find our Morrison. This is the literary revolution that is necessary today. As long as a large proportion of books are addressed only to the privileged elite, as long as literature continues to assault people like my mother or the taxi driver, literature can die. I will watch its death with indifference.

  • Translated by Michael Lucey. Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• Literary Hub - http://lithub.com/edouard-louis-the-family-is-a-curse/

  Édouard Louis: The Family is a Curse
  A Moment of Violence and Vengeance at the Dinner Table
  August 3, 2016 By Edouard Louis

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  I saw my big brother try to kill my father one September evening in 2001. It was a few days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and that’s why I remember the exact date it happened. Or rather, why I can’t forget it. With my father I’d watched the twin towers burst into flames, implode, collapse, my father draining a bottle of whisky in front of the television trying to get control of his grief and he was crying, crying, saying Fuck now the sand niggers and ragheads they’re gonna kill us, this here’s the start of the war, I’m warning you my son get ready because this, I’m telling you now, I’m telling you we’re bound to die, all of us and he was moaning, warning The next bomb they throw will be right in our faces, our French faces and then that’ll be it for all of us for sure. I was nine and I was crying too, like a kid who cries when he sees his parents cry, without really understanding, crying precisely because of this incomprehension, this void, crying because I was afraid of death and because I was too young to realize that my father’s words were only an expression of his violent and racist impulses, the words of a man I would learn to hate in two or three more years.

  So then a week later, without any connection to the attacks except that the striking closeness of the events gives me a time frame for the attempted murder, right in the middle of dinner, in front of the rest of the family, my big brother grabs my father by the hair and starts bashing his head against the kitchen wall: he was killing him, and my father was howling, begging—I’d never seen my father beg anyone—with his face disappearing under the redness of the blood, under the accumulation of gaping, bleeding wounds, and my big brother was yelling I’ll fucking waste you, you son of a bitch I’ll fucking waste you while my mother tried to shield me. She was throwing glasses at my brother to stop him but missed every time and the glasses kept falling, exploding, shattering on the floor. She was shrieking, too, Oh shit, don’t, you’ll kill each other, calm down, hollering at the top of her lungs He’ll kill his father, he’s gonna kill his own father, then she’d whisper in my ear Don’t look sweetie, don’t look, Mama’s right here, don’t look . . .

  But I wanted to look. Because I was the one who’d provoked this fight between my father and my brother, I’d wanted it. It was revenge.

  The story of my revenge begins very early one morning. You have to imagine the scene: I’m drinking hot chocolate in the kitchen, sitting next to my mother and my big brother. They awakened a little while ago and are smoking while watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. They’ve been up for only twenty minutes but have already smoked four or five cigarettes each and the room is stuffy with thick, cloudy smoke. I’m coughing, I had a lot of asthma in those days. My mother and brother are laughing in front of the television, throaty, booming laughs, and they’re still smoking. My father and my sisters weren’t there. I let my mother know that I have to go see a friend in the village to help him fix his bike. She nods without taking her eyes off the TV. I get dressed. I leave the house, I slam the door and head off into the cold, surrounded by the redbrick walls of northern France, by the smell of fog and manure and then, somehow or other, I realize that I’ve forgotten something in my room, so I turn around. When I enter the house, without knocking on the door, I can see the huddled forms of my mother and brother in all the smoke, closer together than they were when I left.
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  And I see what’s going on: my mother is taking advantage of the dim light and the fact that the others aren’t there, she’s giving money to my big brother and I know that my father has forbidden my mother to do this, he ordered her never to give him money again, not ever, because he knows that my brother will use it to buy alcohol and drugs and that once he’s drunk he’ll go tag supermarkets and bus stops or set fire to the stands in the village stadium, he’s already done that several times. My father told my mother Don’t let me catch you again giving money to that troublemaker, so when she sees that I’ve found her out, she gives a start. She comes over to me, furious: You’d better not tattle to your father or else, and then she hesitates. She hesitates over which strategy to adopt, she tries something else, she changes the tone, brings back that soft, imploring voice, Your brother needs money to eat at the lycée but your father just refuses to understand that, so be nice to mama don’t tell papa, you know how he can be such a jerk sometimes . . . I give in. I don’t say anything.

  My mother makes the fatal mistake two weeks later. She doesn’t know yet that she’ll be paying for it before the day is over. On that morning I’m alone with her. We aren’t talking to each other; we never talk to each other. I’m getting ready for school and when I open the door to leave she tells me something, without any particular reason, between two puffs on a cigarette (something she has often told me but rarely that harshly and bluntly), she tells me You’re really not the kid I’d have dreamed of having. Not even ten years old yet and you’ve already shamed the entire family. In the village everyone says you’re a faggot. I don’t know if it’s true but us, we’re stuck with that shame all on account of you. I don’t answer. I leave the house, I close the door without saying a thing and I don’t know why I don’t cry but the whole day after that tastes like my mother’s words: the air tastes like her words, sounds taste like her words, food tastes like ashes. All day long I do not cry.

  That same evening I went home after school. My mother was serving supper and my father turned on the television. He always said we shouldn’t talk during meals, we should watch television, it was a question of good manners. He puts on Walker, Texas Ranger as usual and the entire family watches in silence.

  Then suddenly in the middle of the meal I start shouting. I shout very fast and very loudly with my eyes closed Mama’s giving money to Vincent, she’s still giving him money, I saw her, saw she was giving him some the other day and she told me not to tell you, she said Whatever you do don’t tell your father, she asked me to lie to you and but my father doesn’t let me finish the sentence, he interrupts me, turns to my mother and asks What the fuck is going on here? He says to her You’re screwing around with me or what, what is all this bullshit and he’s raising his voice. He stands up, clenches his fists. I’d been sure that would be his reaction.

  I can’t help it, I look over at my mother, I want her to suffer for humiliating me that morning and I know provoking a fight between my brother and my father is the best way to hurt her; when our eyes meet she says to me You you’re a fucking little piece of shit, she doesn’t try to lie, she looks so disgusted she could throw up. My head droops, I start to feel ashamed of what I’ve just done but for the moment the pleasure of revenge is still on top (it’s later that all I’ll have left is the shame).

  My father explodes, he can’t stop himself anymore, he goes crazy like that when he’s lied to, he throws his glass of red to shatter on the floor, he bellows I’m the one in charge in this house, what’s all this about hiding stuff from me goddamn it to hell, and he yells so loudly that my mother is frightened, she takes me in her arms and she hides my sisters behind her, she tries to calm him, It’ll be OK honey I won’t do it anymore but he’s not simmering down, I knew he wouldn’t, he breaks another glass and my mother loses her temper too: But you’re completely out of control! I’m warning you—if you hurt a single one of my kids with any broken glass I’ll cut your throat, I’ll take you apart, just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean you can scare me and my father starts punching the wall saying Fucking hell whatever did I do to piss off the good Lord and wind up with a family like this, what with a fruit (that’s me he’s talking about) and a drunk good for nothing but getting plastered, look at him, that one (he points at my brother), the loser, and it’s then, at that moment, that my big brother gets up and jumps on my father. He hits him, he hits him again to shut him up, my mother is shrieking in terror, shrill cries, pitifully shrill, my brother grabs my father by the hair, I’ll fucking waste you, you son of a bitch, and he slams my father’s head into the wall with his whole weight, his whole body, and then the cries of pain, the insults, the wails of sorrow, I could feel my mother’s warm tears falling on my head, I was thinking It serves her right, serves her right and while she was trying to cover my eyes, I was watching the scene through her fingers, I saw the patches of purple blood on the yellow tiles. My brother left my father almost dead on the floor and fled.

  A few years later I left my parents and the village of my childhood for good. And if I did so, it was because situations like that one made me understand that the problem with the family isn’t just that it beats you down and buries you with its violence but also, and perhaps above all, it turns you into a cog in that violence, turns you into an active element, instills in you the desire to wound, instills longings for vengeance that you should not have had. The family is a curse, and like all curses it arouses passions in you that are not your own.

  –Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale, for Freeman’s Journal

• Interview - http://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/edouard-louis#_

  CULTURE
  Édouard Louis
  By Christopher Bollen
  Photography Sebastian Kim

  Published 05/01/17

  For many writers, especially a gay one raised in a militantly heterosexual working-class factory town in Northern France, chronicling the trauma and alienation of childhood might prove to be a cathartic experience. Not so for the 25-year-old author Édouard Louis, born Eddy Bellegueule, who says, "I didn't write to escape violence, but to find it. The violence I describe I didn't experience as violence as a kid. It seemed natural, just life." His brutal and brilliant autobiographical novel The End of Eddy was such a hit when it was published in his home country in 2014 that FSG is now releasing its English translation in the United States. In the book, he traces his coming of age, where every outward force—from the bullies at school to his macho-glorifying mostly out-of-work parents—exerts intense conformist pressure on an effeminate boy unable to control his mannerisms much less his desires. Louis's prose-direct, unvarnished, and replete with wisdom as sharp as a scalpel—doesn't soften the blows with sentimental forays into France's lower white classes. In fact, much of why the book caused such a stir is Louis's refusal to blanket the working class in the usual idealistic myths of authenticity and kindness: Eddy's family and neighbors are doomed as well as dooming, predators as well as victims. "I wanted to show how people who are the objects of violence become active participants in it," Louis explains. That even extends to his adolescent self. In one particularly devastating scene, Eddy habitually returns to a secret spot at school where two classmates can beat him up without being witnessed—and later, he fantasizes about sex acts with these same tormenters.

  The worst hometown sin, according to the narrator, is being perceived as "the class enemy" or a defector from your own kind. Even a book in the house was perceived as a threat. "We didn't have books," Louis recalls, "because they represented the life you would never have, the life of educated people who have free time." In a sense, Louis did become a class defector when he escaped his town to study acting at a regional theater school. At age 17, he came across a memoir by his future mentor, the philosopher Didier Eribon, which ignited his passion for literature. Other influences include Toni Morrison, Primo Levi, and Michel Foucault.

  Following the original release of The End of Eddy, when he was just 21, Louis published a second novel in France called Histoire de la Violence, about being sexually assaulted by a stranger he meets on the streets of Paris and invites back to his apartment. He's currently finishing a third book while also working on his PhD, and trying to spend at least a bit of his mid-twenties having fun with friends. And while The End of Eddy has its share of detractors, particularly in his hometown, it also has one especially meaningful fan: "When my book came out, my father phoned me and said, ‘Hello, Édouard. Daddy's so proud of you.' That's the first time he called me by the name I chose for myself."

Louis, Edouard: THE END OF EDDY
(May 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Louis, Edouard THE END OF EDDY Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $25.00 5, 2 ISBN: 978-0-374-26665-3

"We are always playing roles and there is a certain truth to masks": an absorbing but sobering roman a clef by philosopher/novelist Louis and a sharply pointed coming-of-age tale.Kenneth Rexroth, the American poet, published a memoir that bore the title An Autobiographical Novel, he said, at the insistence of the lawyers. No one save for Louis, born Eddy Bellegueule in 1992, can say for sure where novel begins and memoir ends here; the book reads like autobiography unadorned except for occasional dark-lyrical moments, as with the anti-Proustian opening sentence: "From my childhood I have no happy memories." It's abundantly evident, just a few pages in, why Louis should make such a declaration, for though he lives in la belle France, it's in the nearly Appalachian countryside of Picardy, where a gay kid such as himself is a playground victim from the get-go. His father, who--shudder--drinks box wine, box after box, is a raging brute descended from other raging brutes, wants nothing more than to toughen up a boy who won't be toughened. Mom is, like a sans-culotte, "torn between absolute submission to power and an enduring sense of revolt." She smokes like a chimney, aware that it's no good for her but seemingly unconcerned that her asthmatic son might be suffering. Eddy is smart and obliging, even though "being an obedient student at school was considered girlish," and nobody out in the sticks can figure him out except to peg him as "Bellegueule, the homo." Throughout, he grapples with that identity, determined to make himself manly, attempting to convince himself, "Maybe I'm not gay...maybe I've just always had a bourgeois body that was trapped in the world of my childhood." And on the other side of that struggle, self-discovery awaits, patiently.... The best moments of this good though certainly dispiriting book are those in which we sense that better things await the protagonist in a world far beyond his window.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Louis, Edouard: THE END OF EDDY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491002932&it=r&asid=701a7fa7d041e5632a48036530133020. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002932
The End of Eddy
264.10 (Mar. 6, 2017): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

* The End of Eddy

Edouard Louis, trans. from the French by Michael Lucey. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25

(208p) ISBN 978-0-374-26665-3

In this excellent autobiographical novel, a middle school boy struggles to forge an identity in a French industrial town hostile in every way to his homosexuality. Beset on all sides by violent bullying, verbal ridicule, and a lack of familial support, Eddy Bellegueule has devoted himself, despite his high voice and effeminate mannerisms, to becoming a "tough guy" like his unemployed father. A series of heartbreaking setbacks occurs, including two failed relationships with women, which culminates with Eddy's mother discovering him in a compromising sexual situation. The story finally leads to a powerful farewell scene between Eddy and his father, a momentary demonstration of devotion inextricable from the years of pain that the man has caused the boy. Already translated into 20 languages, this concise novel adroitly captures the downstream effects of reactionary rural culture, heightened by the rise of hard-right ideology and the destabilization of the working class in contemporary Europe, granting its reader an extraordinary portrait of trauma and escape. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, the Wylie Agency. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The End of Eddy." Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484973618&it=r&asid=21c51e74cac15f6c0b701b8d57f765e5. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A484973618
The End of Eddy
Michael Cart
113.13 (Mar. 1, 2017): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm

The End of Eddy.

By Edouard Louis. Tr. by Michael Lucey.

May 2017. 208p. Farrar, $25 (9780374266653).

Desperate to change his effeminate image, French middle-school student Eddy adopts the mantra, "Today I'm gonna be a tough guy," like his sometimes-violent father. But how? To hide his gay mannerisms, he keeps his hands in his pockets and tries to deepen his high-pitched voice. He even tries dating girls, but to no effect. "My body," he thinks despairingly, "was always rebelling against me, reminding me what I really wanted." His only hope, he thinks, is to get away from his family and the small village in northern France where he lives. To go where "people wouldn't think of me as a faggot." But where can he go, and can flight truly change who he is? Translated into 20 languages and a huge hit in France, author Louis' unsparingly autobiographical novel is the story of a gay boy's attempts to come to terms with himself. Told in retrospect from the adult Eddy's perspective, the story is less a novel than a collection of linked vignettes. The first part of the book limns life in Eddy's stultifying village and offers intimate portraits of his working-class parents. The second part focuses on Eddy's coming-of-age and his emerging sexuality. Together, the two parts offer a seamless, universal portrait of the experience of growing up gay and gradually coming to accept oneself. --Michael Cart

YA: Though this novel could have been published as YA, its principal appeal will be to older teens who enjoy literary fiction with a French twist. MC.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cart, Michael. "The End of Eddy." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA488689481&it=r&asid=711c46d3c0f5f4cfbfae635383289629. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A488689481
From the bottom up; French fiction
422.9027 (Feb. 11, 2017): p73(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/

The End of Eddy. By Edouard Louis. Translated by Michael Lucey. Harvill Secker; 192 pages. To be published in America by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in May.

"YOU don't get all that used to pain really," writes Edouard Louis about the perpetually sore hands and stiff joints of a cousin who worked as a supermarket checkout girl. Although this autobiographical novel, by a French writer who is still only 24, has stirred a whirlwind of controversy about truth and fiction, class and sexuality, it never moves far from the ordeal of sheer physical suffering.

Eddy Bellegueule--his birth name translates as "Eddy Prettymug"--grows up as a bullied misfit amid the post-industrial underclass of Hallencourt, in northern France. Cursed as a "faggot", Eddy, "the odd boy in the village", is repeatedly brutalised both at home and at school. In vain, he tries to fit in, pretending to have a taste for football, girls, even for homophobia, until escape becomes "the only option left to me". In this culture where male violence appears "natural, self-evident", Eddy's father not only terrorises his family but himself. He suffers excruciating back pain that leaves him "screaming in [the] bedroom" and drives him from his job at a brass foundry. Everywhere, "masculine neglect" in families that have dropped out of steady employment means that these "tough guys" inflict the worst violence on their own bodies. They suffer drunk-driving accidents, chronic pain, untreated injuries and "alcohol-induced comas". One forgotten man even "died in his own excrement". In fighting and abuse, agony begets agony.

A bestseller when it came out in France in 2014, "The End of Eddy" triggered a very French critical skirmish. By this time, Mr Louis had changed his name and gone on to shine at the elite Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Did the book betray Eddy's stricken family as his growing attraction to boys rather than girls "transformed my whole relationship with the world"? Does this narrative of hell in Hallencourt, at once visceral and cerebral, demonise the so-called Lumpenproletariat, or depict tragic victims trapped in roles "both imposed by social forces ... and also consciously assumed"? A disciple of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist, Mr Louis denounces the "class violence" of inequality and opposes the tide of right-wing populism that has swept through such abandoned communities. Michael Lucey's translation conveys both the scorching sorrow and the cool intelligence of a book that--half-misery memoir, half-radical tract--finds a voice for so much pain. The scapegoat of Hallencourt has become its spokesman.

The End of Eddy.

By Edouard Louis. Translated by Michael Lucey.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"From the bottom up; French fiction." The Economist, 11 Feb. 2017, p. 73(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA480519732&it=r&asid=3d9002c820f2b8f4d5028ee12e76147f. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A480519732
A Savage Childhood in Rural France
Jennifer Senior
(May 18, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC6(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com

THE END OF EDDYBy [ETH]douard Louis192 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $23.

It took a few dozen pages to see it, but once I did, it was very hard to unsee: [ETH]douard Louis's ''The End of Eddy'' is the ''Hillbilly Elegy'' of France.

Both Louis's deeply autobiographical novel and J. D. Vance's memoir are stories by precocious young men about the savagery of their childhoods. Both explore cultures of spectacular violence. Both are set in decaying manufacturing towns -- places where the men and women scuff and strain against economic morbidity, class invisibility and narcotizing boredom. Yet these same men and women have a paradoxical relationship with the government, at once resenting its power and depending on its largess. Welfare is as common as rain.

Both books became unexpected cultural phenomena. ''The End of Eddy'' sold 300,000 copies in its first year after publication in 2014, when Louis was 21; ''Hillbilly Elegy'' has been on The New York Times's best-seller list for more than 40 weeks. And both authors, after escaping their hometowns against insuperable odds (''You don't even understand that flight is an option,'' Louis writes), have been recruited to interpret nativist movements in their countries. Louis has spent the last three years explaining the allure of Marine Le Pen -- just recently in this publication -- while Vance spent the run-up to the 2016 election assaying the appeal of Donald J. Trump.

In July 2016, Vance had a conversation about Trump with the journalist Rod Dreher that was so popular it crippled the website of The American Conservative. Three weeks later, Dreher published a letter from a reader in France, telling him about ''an amazing book on the same subject'' but in French: ''En Finir avec Eddy Bellegueule.''

This analogy has its limits, obviously. ''The End of Eddy'' is also a gay coming-of-age story; ''Hillbilly Elegy'' is not. Nor is the context for these two books the same: France is a social democracy, extending to its citizens benefits Americans would find unimaginable; the United States remains, as ever, enthusiastically capitalist, with an instinctive distaste for big government.

But the parallels are unmistakable. Even many of the smaller details in the two books rhyme, no doubt because the distinguishing features of poverty do not vary all that much from place to place. The bad diets. (Vance was chubby as a kid; most of Louis's male relations are obese.) The poor dental hygiene. (Vance writes about ''Mountain Dew mouth''; Louis never brushed his teeth.) The televisions that are always blaring, the women who are always smoking, the problem parent who is always drinking.

''The End of Eddy'' is a novel in name only. The author has said in interviews that ''every word of this book is true,'' a claim even few memoirists dare to make. For anyone interested in learning about the white underclass that's helped power the populist movements of Europe, it is an excellent and accessible place to begin.

Louis is unsparing about the ugliest sides of this movement -- boorishness, xenophobia -- which his parents wear like a badge. (A typical aside from his father: ''Damn towelheads, that's all you see on the news, dirty Arabs.'') But he also understands the existential origins of his parents' anger -- how their foreshortened economic horizons and absence from French culture have shrunk their hopes and prospects to the size of a lemon. Louis grew up in a house without a phone, without doors, without lights in the bedrooms. He was frequently dispatched to the store to buy food on credit, on the theory that no one would say no to a child.

His mother could blame herself all she wanted -- for her pregnancy at 17, her marriage to a brawling lout on permanent disability, her low-paying job and life of dispiriting sameness. But in Louis's estimation, she had only the illusion of agency to change her fate. ''She didn't understand,'' Louis writes, ''that her trajectory, what she would call her mistakes, fit in perfectly with a whole set of logical mechanisms that were practically laid down in advance and nonnegotiable.''

''The End of Eddy,'' however, is not just a remarkable ethnography. It is also a mesmerizing story about difference and adolescence, one that is far more realistic than most.

From the time Eddy, the narrator, is very young, he realizes he is gay. So, we assume, do his parents, though this possibility lurks only in the back alleys of their minds, unarticulated or obliquely expressed (his father, a flamboyant homophobe, calls him the name of a gay reality-TV character). So do the other children. ''Pansy, sissy, wimp, girly boy, pussy, bitch, homo, fruit, poof, queer,'' reads a partial, and printable, scourge of epithets he endures at school.

In a work of traditional fiction, the narrator would perhaps celebrate his outsider status and become a defiant rebel. Not here. Trying to blend in, for better or worse, is what most bullied kids do. How many truly have the courage to lead a life apart? Eddy spends most of his time trying to erase his differences. He dates girls. He calls another effeminate boy ''faggot.''

Violence is a way of life in the town. The walls in Eddy's house are pitted with holes made by his father's fist; whenever the family cat had a litter, his father would stuff the kittens in a plastic bag and swing them against the nearest concrete surface.

But being gay makes Eddy a target for especially imaginative forms of aggression, some of them so disgusting that simply reading about them feels like being physically assaulted. There are at least two instances of Eddy's being forced to taste his bullies' spit. That his last name is ''Bellegueule,'' or ''pretty face,'' doesn't help. (The author changed it to Louis as he was writing this book.)

Yet the reader must wonder whether being gay was ultimately Eddy's salvation. ''Being attracted to boys transformed my whole relationship to the world,'' Louis writes, ''encouraging me to identify with values that were different from my family's.'' Had he been straight, would he have had the imagination and urgent desire to leave the village of his birth? We'll never know. But it's to our benefit, as well as his, that he did.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN FOLLEY)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Senior, Jennifer. "A Savage Childhood in Rural France." New York Times, 18 May 2017, p. C6(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491895959&it=r&asid=d46b82dfcbf0669a6ae2a8af712c7fdf. Accessed 25 May 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A491895959

"Louis, Edouard: THE END OF EDDY." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491002932&asid=701a7fa7d041e5632a48036530133020. Accessed 25 May 2017. "The End of Eddy." Publishers Weekly, 6 Mar. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA484973618&asid=21c51e74cac15f6c0b701b8d57f765e5. Accessed 25 May 2017. Cart, Michael. "The End of Eddy." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2017, p. 38. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA488689481&asid=711c46d3c0f5f4cfbfae635383289629. Accessed 25 May 2017. "From the bottom up; French fiction." The Economist, 11 Feb. 2017, p. 73(US). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA480519732&asid=3d9002c820f2b8f4d5028ee12e76147f. Accessed 25 May 2017. Senior, Jennifer. "A Savage Childhood in Rural France." New York Times, 18 May 2017, p. C6(L). General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA491895959&asid=d46b82dfcbf0669a6ae2a8af712c7fdf. Accessed 25 May 2017.

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