Edouard Louis measures the gap between his brother and him

The writer Edouard Louis, in Stockholm, in 2022. JESSICA GOW / TT NEWS AGENCY VIA AFP

“L’Effondrement”, by Edouard Louis, Seuil, 240 p., €20, digital €15.

First there was the explosion Put an end to Eddy Bellegueule (Seuil, 2014), spectacular entry into literature of a young man of 21 years old. Edouard Louis recounted his youth in a Picardy lumpenproletariat family, the violence of which he had been a victim there, the bullying that his homosexuality had caused him, and his escape as far as possible, through books and studies, to save his skin. . Triumph in bookstores, translations throughout the world. The ten years and six books that followed have continued to confirm the important place of the writer in the French and international editorial landscape, to make manifest his desire to articulate political and literary radicalism.

But, from one text to another, we also saw Edouard Louis, while he worked to bring to light the logic of domination, endeavoring to nuance the portrait of the members of his family: of his sister in History of violence (Seuil, 2016), but especially of its progenitor in Who killed my father (Seuil, 2018) and his mother in Fights and metamorphoses of a woman Then Monique escapes (Threshold, 2021 and 2024).

As if the author, as he grew in and through writing, became aware of the violence that his family had experienced and carried back into the home and felt he had no other choice but to forgive them; as if he also set his books with the task of reducing the distance between his parents and himself, this distance whose immensity, if not the insurmountable character, his first novel seemed to have confirmed.

The question of distance has always been essential in the relationship between Edouard Louis and his brother. She even defines it: « Nos dirtyhe writes in The Collapse, it was neither my life nor his but the gap between the two of us. » And also: “Nothing can tell this distance between us. Nothing can tell the distance but this distance says everything. Distance is a memory. » And it is this memory that Edouard Louis summons as he dedicates this novel to this brother who died at the age of 38 as a result of his alcoholism, even though they had not seen each other for almost a decade.

Not the good role

“I felt nothing at the news of my brother’s death; neither sadness, nor despair, nor joy, nor pleasure. » So begins this book which will try to understand why this man, whose first name we will not know, was found so young on a tiled floor, one morning in January, and why he had made sure to make himself so detestable (“Learning to know my brother was learning to hate him”).

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