En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (original 2014; edição 2014)

I read this mostly after reading and watching a lot of his interviews and finding myself gravitating to how honest he was and how he was able to describe the violence of being working-class and the invisibility that is deliberately enforced on them. So when I read this, I honestly did not read it as "a novel" since I knew it was based so much on his own life and gave up trying to make my head think of it as so.

The book is a spare and brutal telling of growing up in a poor village in northern france, and also about the masculinity that he struggled with, to live up to the socially acceptable version of masculinity that was so virile perhaps because the men there felt so disempowered and angry with their life, and the violence and punishment when you did not live up to this standard was so harsh. When he later entered into more bourgeois spaces, he notes how the men were more "feminine" and gentle.

"I do not know if the boys from the hallway would have referred to their own behaviour as violent. The men in the village never used that word; it wasn't one that ever crossed their lips. For a man violence was something natural, self-evident."

What struck me most was the violence that was recounted, not simply as a series of events, but as experiences felt on the body, that even in re-telling cannot ever be truly described. In fact, the body's experience of poverty, violence, homophobia and the rigid masculinity enforced on it is persistently felt throughout the book. His re-telling of what his cousin Sylvain's life was like, the domestic violence faced by women, his own violent bullying by two homophobic boys, his father's destroyed back due to work in the factory. He connected these threads together: that the violence they produced in that village was also in part due to the violence they were being subjected to, as people sacrificed to the social order.

And then there's the persistent theme of self-policing and self-consciousness. If you grow up working-class or poor, when you enter into the middle-class or bourgeois spaces, the experience of realising that so much of your body is behaving in ways that feel wrong is such an intense, private, even humiliating feeling. It's so humbling in a way that makes you even want to turn back even as you dream of running away. There were moments of this throughout the book, most starkly for me (perhaps because it's near the end) when he throws the jacket his family saved up for because it is no longer fashionable in the middle school he went to.

I thought the final chapter felt rushed which is such a shame, but for a first book, it is really quite brilliant. Here are the first lines, that say so much already:

"From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don't mean to say that I never, in all those years, felt any happiness or joy. But suffering is all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of anything that doesn't fit into its system." ( )

Raw and unflinching, interesting to read this kind of writing from a working class and non-urban voice. The early sexual encounters are an amazing, if disturbing, read. ( )

Crude account of growing up queer in working class France of the 1990s, written without much perspective by a very young author.

Like a French + gay "Angela's Ashes" without the Celtic humor. I didn't "buy it." ( )

Odotukset olivat todella korkealla kun aloin kuunnella tätä kirjaa, mutta hyvin nopeasti huomasin että suomennos ja äänikirjan lukija eivät tehneet tarinalle oikeutta. Koskettava tarina muuttui kömpelöksi ja vaivaannuttavaksi. Vaikka kertojanäänen olikin varmaan tarkoitus olla lapsenomainen, en päässyt tarinaan kiinni ja se jäi melko pinnalliseksi. En pitänyt Ville-Veikko Niemelän lukutyylistä ja/tai äänestä, vaikka se onkin hyvin neutraali. Ehkä en pidä suomenkielisistä äänikirjoista? Tätä pitää ehkä miettiä. Harmi, jos tämä onkin syy miksi lukukokemus (tai kuuntelukokemus!) jäi minulle latteaksi. Joku ongelma minulla on yleensäkin ranskan kielestä suomennettujen teosten kanssa, sillä tätä tapahtuu tässä kieliparissa usein.

Osansa saa kuitenmin tarinakin; en tiedä mitä odotin, mutta en pysty mitenkään yllättymään ranskalaisesta työväenluokkaisesta homofobiasta. Sama ilmiö on olemassa pitkin läntistä maailmaa, ja toisilla tavoilla ilmentyvää vastaavaa ahdasmielisyyttä kaikkialla. Ehkä olen jo liian kyyninen liikuttumaan tästä todellisuudesta, joka ei todellakaan ole fiktiivinen. ( )

It takes some courage to write in an open, honest and often unflattering manner about personal experience (the book is presented as an autobiographical novel). It felt brutal and somewhat depressing. But also humorous and a little optimistic. Louis sometimes shows compassion for the people who tormented and oppressed him while also being harsh and condescending toward them. The tension between seems to be an essential part of the narrative, both of experience and internal conflict. I'm not sure how I feel about some of what was said. ( )