My father and my brothers wanted to finish off Eddy Bellegueule long before, at a time when I was still trying to save him.Įddy grows up gay in a world where narrow norms of masculinity are strictly enforced. 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. It sounds dramatic, but yes, I wanted to kill him-he wasn’t me, he was the name of a childhood I hated. Who is Eddy Bellegueule, and why do you want to finish him off?Įddy Bellegueule is the name my parents gave me when I was born. It’s as if he’s taken the whole place and put it behind glass-like observing the inner workings of an anthill. The novel, which has earned Louis comparisons to Zola, Genet, and de Beauvoir, is set to appear in English later this year.Įddy 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. But hundreds of thousands of copies have sold in France, and the book is being translated into more than twenty languages. His publisher thought the first edition, two thousand copies, would last years. “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. 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.Įn 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. I’d be astonished if the author’s father doesn’t read it and recognise every word as real – and find in it a difficult joy.Édouard Louis, born in 1992, grew up in Hallencourt, a village in the north of France where many live below the poverty line. The Wikipedia entry on Édouard Louis describes this book (on 9 October 2019) as a novel. ‘Why do we never name these names?’ the words just about scream from the page. Though he suffers severe pain from the injury, policies brought in by the governments of Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron ensure that he doesn’t receive the help he needs but must continue in demeaning and damaging work. The father is critically injured in an industrial accident. There’s a turn about 20 pages from the end. It’s a passionate, painful, complex monologue, full of rage and frustration, reaching a kind of climax when the teenaged son deliberately provokes a near-murderous family row, and in the end it’s a love letter. Your manhood condemned you to poverty, to lack of money. Masculinity – don’t act like a girl, don’t be a faggot – meant that you dropped out as fast as you could to show everyone you were strong, as soon as you could to show you were rebellious, and so, as far as I can tell, constructing your masculinity meant depriving yourself of any other life, any other future, any other prospect that school might have opened up. In all but the first couple of pages, Édouard Louis speaks to his father, who is still alive at the time of writing, presenting him (and, of course, us) with a mosaic of memories from which emerges a picture of how the father’s ‘male privilege’ and ‘hatred of homosexuality’ affected the son, but also the constricting and distorting effect they have had on the father: For a start, it wields a certain amount of intellectual heft (Ruth Gilmore is not the only scholar to illuminate the narrative). This is not an agony memoir, a whining portrait of a father who made his Gay son’s life a misery. The same definition holds with regard to male privilege, to hatred of homosexuality or trans people, to domination by class – to social and political oppression of all kinds. When asked what the word racism means to her, the American scholar Ruth Gilmore has said that racism is the exposure of certain populations to premature death. The opening sentences of Who Killed My Father – notice the absence of a question mark, also a feature of the French title Qui a tué mon père – says a lot: It’s as if it calls out to that book: ‘This is what it’s like inside your story!’ Édouard Louis is a young Gay man who has escaped from the working-class conditions that have destroyed his father’s life. Arthur, one of the sons of the mining family in Black Sheep, disappears overnight, and only we and his youngest brother Ted know that he has escaped rather than met with disaster. It was purely fortuitous that I read this book immediately after Susan Hill’s Black Sheep, but they make a beautiful pair.
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