L’effondrement

Édouard Louis recently published L’effondrement (Seuil).

“My brother spent much of his life dreaming. In his poor, working-class world, where social violence often manifested itself in the way it restricted desires, he imagined that he would become a world-famous craftsman, that he would travel, that he would make his fortune, that he would repair cathedrals, that his father, who had disappeared, would return and love him.

His dreams collided with his world, and he was unable to realize any of them.

He wanted to run away from his life more than anything else, but no one had taught him to run away, and everything about him – his brutality, his behavior with women and with others – condemned him; gambling and alcohol were all he had left to forget.

At the age of thirty-eight, after years of failure and depression, he was found dead on the floor of his small studio apartment.

This book is the story of his collapse.

É. L.”

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