by Édouard Louis
translated by Michael Lucey
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Published: 2017
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Genre: LGBTQ, France
Hardback: 208
Rating: 5
First sentence(s):
From my childhood I have no happy memories.
An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.
“Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different―“girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.
Already translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result―a critical and popular triumph―has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.
My two-bits:
It's a gem. Although not a pretty story, I loved the telling. I could not help but feel for the protagonist.
* part of Tournament of Books 2018 (here)
