The End of Eddy, Edouard Louis’ fiction/creative nonfiction/memoir of growing up working class in Northern France, which he could write only because he was no longer working class, not entirely anyway, but had made himself into a literary writer, was reviewed in Litbreak Magazine last year.
History of Violence is 213 small trim-size pages in this agile and sensitive translation by Loren Stein. There are thousand-page books, widely praised, that are not as rich. It counts as a kind of sequel to Eddy since we now see our hero of his own life living his dream in Paris.
He has a studio apartment off the Place de Republique and a pair of bookish friends, Didier and Geoffroy. As Christmas presents, Didier has given him two books by Nobel prize winner Claude Simon, autographed to Didier. Geoffroy has given him a complete works of Nietzsche. Louis mentions Nietzsche’s late work Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) specifically as being included in his gift.
Louis carries the books face-out, so their covers are visible, on Christmas Eve, back to his apartment. It’s late. On route, he encounters an Algerian immigrant, Reda. The encounter is menacing at first. Louis is being stalked by Reda. Then it seems that Reda is trying to pick him up. He’s charming. Louis decides he likes him and recklessly invites him over.
After sex, Louis spies the edge of his iPad sticking out of Reda’s coat pocket. His cell phone is missing also. In a round-about and excessively gentile way, Louis asks Reda if he has seen his missing cell phone. Louis jumps through circuitous phrasing to get his cell phone returned without outrightly accusing Reda of taking it. Reda starts shouting that he and his family are being insulted. He wraps Louis’ scarf around his neck and starts choking him. Then he rapes him. It’s bloody, terrifying. Louis finally gets Reda out of his apartment. The aftermath of the violence is the bulk of the book.
Key to History of Violence is its complex interweaving of voice. Returning to his family home in the north, Louis listens at the door as Clara, his sister, relates the experience to her husband in the next room. Clara’s narrative is placed in quotes. But she is telling what Louis has told her, from her own angle of vision. Louis as the author of History of Violence is reporting his own words and the events of his own life as attributed to someone else. He is quoting someone else quoting him, telling the story of someone else telling his story.
As the text of History of Violence plays out its layered voices, Louis’ personality is fissuring. Edouard Louis is a writer who can frack his own brain.
His supportive friends want him to report the incident to the police, saying he must. He hates them for insisting. His trauma is being taken away from him and will now be owned by the police as he is shepherded from one police station to another-the security bureaucracy has kicked in. Later, at the hospital to get emergency treatment to safeguard against getting AIDS from the attack, he is kept waiting by a doctor who is apparently doing nothing much in her office while he is waiting outside. Back at home, he has a friend wait in the lobby while fingerprint experts comb his apartment for clues at 2 AM in the morning. The friend ends up waiting in the dark as the lobby light keeps automatically turning itself off. After the forensic people leave, Louis sends his patient friend home anyway. He wants to be alone. Then he is afraid to be alone. Feeling violated, he has scrubbed himself down and scrubbed his apartment down after the attack. Yet he has left a couple of items on the floor that Reda left behind. Is Louis still attracted to the guy who raped him? It seems like a question Louis doesn’t want to ask himself.
Louis talks about that kind of light dreaming where you can attempt to direct the events since you realize you are dreaming. This book is clearly labeled “A Novel” on the cover and “Fiction” on the flyleaf. So how much of History of Violence is factually “true”. Does Louis really have friends named “Didier and Geoffroy”? Did he really get a complete Nietzsche as a present on Christmas Eve? Was he really raped that night in his apartment? Am I not entitled to ask these questions if the book is classified as “Fiction”, even if the clear implication is that the book is autobiographical?
I remember enjoying Rebecca West’s seminal work of travel literature Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, one of the outstanding reading experiences of my life. It’s an account of her travels with her husband through Yugoslavia on the eve of World War II. I was intrigued by the Wests and their sometime traveling companions. But online research led me to the conclusion that some of those companions didn’t really exist, as presented to the reader anyway, except as story facilitators.
There was quite a rumble, years back, at Oprah Winfrey’s book club when James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces was “exposed” as fictional, or creative non-fiction. Oprah’s audience felt betrayed. The memoir had lost its value because it wasn’t “true”. Of course, it doesn’t have to be strictly factual to have value or salience as literature. But Oprah’s audience was having none of that, and Oprah was obliged to share her audience’s rage or lose them.
The leading trend in contemporary art nowadays seems to be a questioning of our modes of perception. It’s like we’re turning the mirror around to look at ourselves looking, attempting to be aware of how we are conceptualizing and constructing our world. I believe that one of the reasons that Oprah’s audience was upset was that they were shown constructing their own reality, a process that they didn’t want to confront. And maybe that’s why it’s especially wonderful to have a writer like Edouard Louis among us, a writer who is offering us more gifts than he is receiving.
