“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 by a 21-year-old young man. Edouard Louis recounted his youth in a lumpenproletariat family in Picardy, the violence of which he had been a victim there, the harassment that his homosexuality had caused him and his escape as far as possible, through books and studies, to save the skin. Success in bookstores, translations around the world. The ten years and six books that followed continued to confirm the writer’s important place in the French and international publishing scene, highlighting his desire to articulate political and literary radicalism.
But, from one text to another, we also saw Edouard Louis, as he worked to bring to light the logic of domination, trying to nuance the portrait of his family members: his sister in history of violence (Seuil, 2016), but especially from his father in Who killed my father? (Seuil, 2018) and his mother in Struggles and metamorphosis of a woman. So monique escapes (Threshold, 2021 and 2024).
As if the author, as he grew in and through writing, became aware of the violence his family had experienced and brought into the home and felt he had no choice but to forgive them; as if he had also entrusted his books with the task of reducing the distance between his parents and himself, a distance whose immensity, if not insurmountable character, his first novel seemed to have confirmed.
The question of distance has always been fundamental in the relationship between Edouard Louis and his brother. He even defines it: “Our liveswrite in The collapse, It was neither my life nor his, but the gap between the two of us. » And also: “Nothing can distinguish this distance between us. Nothing can say distance but this distance says everything. The distance is a memory. » And it is this memory that Edouard Louis evokes when 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.
It’s not the good role
“I didn’t feel anything at the news of my brother’s death; neither sadness, nor despair, nor joy, nor pleasure. » Thus begins this book that will try to understand why this man, whose name we do not know, was found so young on a tile floor, one January morning, and why he had made sure to become so detestable (“Learning to know my brother was learning to hate him”).
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