Édouard Louis
Born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, in 1992, ÉDOUARD LOUIS is a novelist and the editor of a scholarly work on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu.
Who Killed My Father
This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father.
Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French—at the minimum—of negligent homicide.
The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe:
“You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.
But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, once damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.
Translated from the French by Lorin Stein
Part memoir, part scathing social critique, Who Killed My Father takes France to task for its callous treatment of working-class people. Fans of Knausgaard’s My Struggle will devour this slim but resonant book
Part lament, part searing polemic…Louis’s indictment echoes what has become a battle cry among the French precariat: a crucial text.
From Jacques Chirac to Emmanuel Macron, Louis blames for his father’s ills, for the misery that produced him and so many like him, men seen in the newspapers recently, demonstrating in the streets of Paris and other French cities, wearing gilets jaunes.
A challenge to society’s unfettered praise of individual responsibility and its blindness to systemic injustice. Louis’ barbed prose delivers a warning to the French elite about the poverty and underlying anger of the working classes.
Louis unpacks the reality of shame, by examining over and again what has gone on between himself and his father. His sentences narrow in, Beckett-like, on the texture of the life he left behind.
After Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante . . . it’s difficult to find a literary sensation that has transfixed so many readers.
