Who Killed My Father

by Édouard Louis, Lorin Stein (Translator)

Overview

Now in paperback, this bracing book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father

Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French politicians— at the minimum—of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe: “You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that. Hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, damaged early on by shame, poverty, and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811235044
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/02/2023
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	4.10(w) x 6.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, in 1992, E´DOUARD LOUIS is a novelist and the editor of a scholarly work on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu.

Editorial Reviews

"Canny, brilliant: a devastating emotional force."— Garth Greenwell The New Yorker

"The homecoming recounted in this book, linking the intimate with the political,
does not blunt Louis’s message, but sharpens it to a fine point. Between his
virtuously bourgeois-bohème reader and his father, he chooses his father. This
is not politics as love, but love as politics. A declaration to his father becomes
a manifesto."— The Baffler

"A brief, poetic telling of the myriad ways societal contempt, homophobia, and
poverty can kill a man. Louis serves as both raconteur and son, expressing
deep and considered empathy for a man whose absence looms large."— NPR

"In Who Killed My Father, [Louis'] fury has been trained and redirected. The new target is the ruling class."— Tara K. Menon The Nation

From the Publisher

2018-12-11

A memoir implicates French politicians in the suffering of its citizens.

When he was growing up, Louis (History of Violence, 2018, etc.) didn't get along with his father. The patriarch lived by a simple creed: "be a man, don't act like a girl, don't be a faggot." Surprising words for young Louis, who is gay, to hear, even more so given that a man who would "sneer at any sign of femininity in a man" once dressed as a cheerleader and cried while watching opera. A détente began when the author's father was injured at the factory where he worked. Something heavy fell on him and "mangled" his back, and he was so weak that he got winded walking to the bathroom. Most of the book focuses on Louis' relationship with his father, but then, in an abrupt shift, the author spends the last 15 pages enumerating policies that he argues have emasculated his father and worsened life for France's poorest citizens. Sometimes, the author's attempts to connect his family's tragedy to world events go too far, such as when he invokes concentration camps. More relevant are his critiques of French politicians: former President Jacques Chirac's announcement "that dozens of medications would no longer be covered by the state"; former President Nicolas Sarkozy's change to basic unemployment benefits that forced Louis' father to take jobs such as street sweeper; and the current president, Emmanuel Macron, who cut 5 euros per month from the subsidy that allows France's poor to pay their rent while he cut taxes for the wealthy. Whatever one's politics, readers of this impassioned work are likely to be moved by the Louis family's plight and the love, however strained, between the author and his father.

In 2004, fascinated by the Berlin Wall, 12-year-old Louis peppered his father with questions about it. As this poignant book shows, there are still walls—within families, between leaders and citizens—that need to be torn down.

Kirkus Reviews