“FRIDAY RE-VERSO”
“Today I’m going to be tough (and I’m crying while writing these lines).”
Wandering through the shelves of bookstores these days you will find the latest reprint of the literary debut of Édouard Louis. A student of Didier Eribon, to whom the work is dedicated, he follows in his footsteps with the impulsive unscrupulousness that comes from being a few years younger than his master. Being able to do so, we read this first publication with the benefit of retrospect, well prepared by “Who Killed My Father?” and “The Method for Becoming Another”, as well as by “Return to Reims” by Eribon himself; we can therefore allow ourselves to speak of a journey rather than a departure.
This, however, deprives us of the impact that “Farla fine con Eddy Bellegueule” had when it was first published, now ten years ago: the indissoluble connection (which Eribon had already traced) between class, culture and individual awareness exploded on the publishing scene thanks to the audacity of twenty-year-old Louis who, he says, was published only after the refusal of many publishers who responded that “no one could believe what was written.” First of all, it must be said that, in this first chapter of his autobiography, Louis does not end anything at all. It is a sort of declaration of intent that remains unfinished but of which we glimpse all the impervious path to follow. If in Eribon it is the essayist, the scholar who prevails in the detachment with which he analyses his own path, in Louis it is the anger and viscerality of the man who is not yet mature that dictate the most emotional pages.
Being a very young homosexual in a small village in northern France. Some images: the family from “Matilde”; some clips from “Shameless”. Take the humor out of these frames. You are young, your father is an alcoholic victim of the factory where he threw away his best years, at school they beat you up every day, you plan embarrassing public appointments just so you don’t hear yourself yelling “faggot!” in the hallways. But also: the broken and never repaired window through which cold and humidity enter; the bunk bed that falls on your sister; your mother’s “tonight we’re eating milk”.
The violent force of this book lies in the fact that you feel the viscous spit of the bullies dripping down your face. You feel helpless, still far from the explosion, so before running away you try to “function” in a country (socio-cultural context) that does everything to make you feel defective, abnormal, out of place – in a word: wrong. And it is not a single individual who is bothersome or ignorant: it is the whole group of people who inhabit life as you have always known it. You feel small.
You don’t have to be gay to feel the weight of such an injustice; you don’t have to be poor to understand the cold and hunger; you don’t have to be unlucky to be kind to someone who is at that moment. Empathy – a word often misunderstood or only partially understood – is the human capacity that draws nourishment from literature more than any other. Édouard Louis does not only talk about misery and suffering (even if the book opens like this: “I have no happy memories of my childhood.”): he also talks about desire and liberation and self-determination. But the urgency of his writing lies in unfolding before our eyes an accurate, vivid and three-dimensional picture of everything that creates that suffering and that anger and he does so, in this debut, without explanations or captions. Without morbidity. Further on: without judgment, trying to dig into the past years the roots of what he lived and felt, finally managing to give us his gaze and his skin.
Before anyone dares to think that we want to compare homosexuality to poverty or misfortune, to a condition that is somehow negative, let’s clarify the point: any determination, even well-being or having a certain culture, can become brutally disadvantageous in a hostile context. What we define as injustice, what the writer considers as the worst of evils, the deprivation of freedom (here: to be oneself), is born and grows in the gaze of those who distance themselves, of those who are afraid to feel together, of those who do not dare to face what they do not understand or do not know. Of those who fear the other.
Reading this book makes another’s wound bleed on our body. We read for this. To bring certain wounds out of the pages as if they were our own. One day you will want someone to have compassion for yours and you will be lucky if, among others, he has read Édouard Louis.
Written by Delis
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Édouard Louis, The End of Eddy, Bompiani, Milano, 2014
Original edition: En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, Seuil, Paris, 2014