If this book were a play, a father and a son would stand in a large, empty room, a few meters between them. They barely look at each other, sometimes their bodies touch, but they remain isolated from each other. The son tells the story of his father, for whom the father has no words.
With this scene starts the new, slim book by Édouard Louis, "Who killed my father". An autobiographical text, like the other two books of the 26-year-old, and a very angry, sometimes radically polemical. Louis, who is actually known as Eddy Bellegueule, is a bestselling author, one of France's best-known writers. He cites Sartre and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, calls what he does "confrontational" and expresses sympathy for the yellow vests. His new book was also read in the Élysée Palace.
The factory eats its people. One day, the man who is Édouard Louis' father has a serious accident while working. A burden falls on him, his spine is shattered. It takes a long time before he can talk and move again. The pain stays with him throughout his life. He gets social welfare but has to look for a new job and is eventually hired in a different city as a street sweeper.
Voice tube of his worker-father
You "had to buckle despite your ruined spine," writes the son, accusing a number of politicians: Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron and many more. "The story of your body is the story of those names that have come together to destroy you." The father, the victim, the political elite, the perpetrators.
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What Édouard Louis wrote here is pure class-struggle prose from the spirit of Marxism. The son exploits the story of the father to let his anger against the "rulers" run wild. ( Read here an essay by Louis on the French working class ) He, the intellectual who now lives no longer in the northern French village from which he comes, but in Paris, becomes the mouthpiece of his working-class father, born in 1967.
"Who killed my father" is also a book of reconciliation. In his childhood, Édouard Louis suffered from his irascible, often alcoholized father. The author describes this with merciless sharpness in his brilliant debut "The End of Eddy". Also in the new book, he casts light on his depressing childhood, repeating episodes that we already know from his debut. Again and again it is about humiliation, shame and disappointment.
One evening Eddy's family invites guests to his home, and he has rehearsed a performance with three other boys, and they appear together as a pop band. Eddy plays a singer, dancing exalted, the guests watch, only the father looks away ostentatious, and the son is hit hard.
Louis pointedly points out that his father's obsession with masculinity also has to do with the systematic ousting of his own secret tendencies. Even the father once liked to dance and get wet eyes in the desperate opera aria of a singer on TV. But he averts it all. That the son performs in his opinion like a fagot, the father filled with deep shame.
Instrumentalised reconciliation?
Years later, the father, now over fifty and seriously ill, apologizes to his son. That is new. Also new is that the father, who throughout his life said that the problems of France are the fault of foreigners and homosexuals, is now criticizing racism in the country. And that he accepts the homosexuality of the son, his political commitment means well. A feeling and opinion turnaround around 180 degrees.
DISPLAY
Édouard Louis:
Who killed my father
translated by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel
S. Fischer Verlag; 80 pages; 16 euros
Order at Amazon. Order from Thalia.
As a reader in this theses book, one has the feeling that Louis also instrumentalizes the reconciliation with his father, as a solidarization campaign staged. A late, beloved love for the man who has messed up your childhood, you imagine, different, more thoughtful, more subtle.
And yet, despite all criticism, even in the French media, "Who killed my father" is a disturbing book. Because it's about social advancement and social permeability. For missed opportunities and entanglements in fatal thought patterns.
Perhaps, a friend of the author speculates, the father has suffered "that he could and would not have become somebody else". In return, the father believed in his intelligent son, because once he could become something decent, teacher, doctor or even minister. When the son finds out, he is terrified. Why, dammit, had not the father told him that?