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The End of Eddy #review and my #reading in February
Édouard Louis (b.1992) has written without sentimentality about violence, poverty, class, racism and sexuality in his autobiographical novel, The End of Eddy, first published in 2014 but only recently translated into English by Michael Lucey (2017). Set in Picardy during the late twentieth century, the novel details a world the author wishes to escape. It feels like a bildungsroman but as a self-consciously political novel is much more than that.
The writing is intimate yet detached and impersonal. There is very little dialogue and the sentences short. The voices of the protagonist’s mother, father, cousin, school peers and other locals are italicised as we hear from a class of people trapped in a world of poverty and ignorance fuelled by television and alcohol. This is very political life-writing but it is also impactful prose. From the opening pages the reader is confronted in a semantically brutal fashion with descriptive passages that physically repel almost leading one to push the book away to avoid the spittle:
As with Karl Ove Knausgaard in Norway, this is life-writing that stirred many outside French literary circles but for different reasons. The depictions of the working poor and unemployed as xenophobic, violently homophobic and abusively alcoholic was deeply offensive – depending on perspective – as either a misrepresentation of a class of people or a condemnation of such brutish behaviour. There are very narrow ideas about masculinity in the village and Eddy struggles with his effeminacy, often aping the machoism of his peers and elders. Some of the episodes are very challenging on numerous levels. The imagery in the novel is often cruelly effective. The following passages are deeply moving:
The world of school is so often not the world children inhabit but Eddy often found it to be a reprieve from relentless physical and verbal brutality. He does try to deny his sexuality to survive at school and home but the reality is he knew from the youngest age what he really wanted. The challenge of leaving a working or under class background at the gates of the school is very apparent to Eddy – and the author.
This was how it was when I was a young reader too. Very few books were recognisably about the world I inhabited. Colin Thiele’s Blue Fin spoke to me as I recognised the characters and the boy’s situation. As an Australian, I recognised a great deal of Eddy’s world from my own childhood and related to the challenges of class, poverty, dirt, violence and racism. The story is more universal than French. Education has always been a way out. Sort of.
Louis was the editor of essays examining the importance of Pierre Bourdieu – the French philosopher whose most important work, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984) explores how classes distinguish themselves aesthetically – just prior to this debut novel being published. With this in mind, it is important to know the author changed his name on publication of the novel signifying that he had left the world of his past behind. Eddy Bellegueule, the protagonist, grew up in the village of Hallencourt before departing to study social sciences and philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.
This interview in The Paris Review illuminates Louis’ thinking:
This is an important novel and has my highest recommendation. I look forward to the translation of his latest novel, Histoire de la violence (2016) and it is worth reading his Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive with Geoffroy de Lagasnerie – originally published in Le Monde on September 27–28, 2015 – while you wait to see the outcome of the French elections this year.
Other titles read during February
Hegel’s Owl: The Life of Bernard Smith (2016) by Sheridan Palmer
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (2014) by Steven Pinker
Mindfulness in Plain English (1991) by Bhante Henepola Gunarantana
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell