Literature must persist in moving this border, to speak of the things society has relegated to silence and privacy. We often dismiss as too intimate those things we prefer to not talk 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. But then I would think, That’s precisely what I must write. I kept thinking, This is too intimate, too personal. You write so unflinchingly about your family. 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. 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. I wanted to invert the way the story of the outsider is told.
My dream was that my parents would look me in the eyes. 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.
They were always so unique, so gifted, so different from the environment they were predestined to escape. 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. Wanting so desperately to fit in made me look at class from a different angle than I’d previously encountered in literature. He would tell me the community mocked our family because I acted like a girl, that I was too flamboyant. My father used to say, You are the shame of the family. But the book describes how the boy doesn’t want to be different, how he struggles to be like everyone else. I was incapable of them-the sight of me playing football was hilarious-and so from the beginning I was excluded. I always hated typical masculine activities. One of the instruments of this daily violence is the cult of masculinity. 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. And it’s clear these circumstances produce brutality through what Pierre Bourdieu called the principle of the conservation of violence.
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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. The real subject of the book is how people like the ones in my village suffer from exclusion, domination, poverty. 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.
Édouard Louis, born in 1992, grew up in Hallencourt, a village in the north of France where many live below the poverty line.
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