Who Killed My Father
Edouard Louis
(Author)
Lorin Stein
(Translator)
Description
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
Price
$12.95
$12.04
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
May 02, 2023
Pages
96
Dimensions
4.53 X 7.05 X 0.29 inches | 0.2 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811235044
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, in 1992, Édouard Louis is the author of two novels and the editor of a scholarly work on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of "Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive," published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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"
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"
