(Paris) Ten years, seven novels, the last of which will be published on Friday: at almost 32 years old, the French writer Édouard Louis closes his “family fresco” with the story of his big brother who died at 38, in The collapse.
The character already appeared in what was the founding story, Put an end to Eddy Bellegueulethe shock of the literary season in January 2014, translated into around thirty languages. He is the subject of The collapsepublished by Editions du Seuil.
“This book is the conclusion of a family fresco, started with Eddy Bellegueule 10 years ago. After that, I will no longer write the word family,” explained Édouard Louis on Facebook and Instagram at the end of September.
This brother was nine years older than Édouard Louis, and the same mother, but not the same father. When his mother remarried, this boy was rejected by his “father”, as another half-sister of the writer describes it.
Forever scarred by “the Wound” caused by this abandonment, as we read in the novel, the young man sank into addictions, mainly alcoholism. This disease destroyed his organs and eventually killed him.
“Years of investigation”
We become familiar with him, his journey, his quirks, his many failures in life, his personality, a mixture of violence and devotion. The reader does not learn his first name at any point.
“It’s a book that forced me to move away from the territory of sociology and enter that of psychiatry and psychology, to identify the problem of depression,” explained the author.
“It is therefore a book which deploys a completely different language, new for me, and which required years of investigation, reflections, detours,” he added.
The references cited are not Pierre Bourdieu, the sociologist of “symbolic violence”, but the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud or the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. Former companions of the brother provide biographical details.
Édouard Louis did not promote this new book. He continued in September, in Nancy or Strasbourg, that of the previous book Monique escapespublished less than six months ago, which tells the story of how her mother fled a violent partner.
The weekly Marianne described this novel as “yet another rehash of his family saga”, while the daily The World hailed “a vibrant story about the price to pay to escape oppression”.
“Aggressing literature”
Édouard Louis, who leaves few readers indifferent, explained that with Monique escapeshe had wanted to “attack literature”. He listed the sums spent to enable his mother to escape.
In The collapsehe extends this enterprise by detailing the villainies and setbacks of an ordinary petty delinquent, who plunges and plunges again into drinking binges with bad company.
The author, however, tries to avoid or attenuate the shock scenes, going against an entire tradition of naturalist literature depicting the debauchery and obscenity of the poor, which hypnotized the bourgeois public to the point that Maupassant spoke of “low- fondmania”. Or more recently from the book The shitiness of thingsby Belgian Dimitri Verhulst, who in 2006 describes in detail a family with extreme alcoholics, for comic purposes, adapted into a film by Felix Van Groeningen in 2009.
The more the book progresses, the more its protagonist declines. He also disappoints. His adoptive father, who, although he also drank a lot, clocked in on time every morning at the factory, constantly reminded him that he was “a failure”. Before losing his temper when he goes to seek help elsewhere.
“This is what family is: first it chases you away and then it blames you for running away,” Édouard Louis bitterly remarks.