The End of Eddy
"I remember less the milk still warm from the cow's udders, brought by my mother from the farm across the way, than I do the evenings when we didn't have enough to eat, and when my Mother would say Tonight we're having milk, one of poverty's neologisms." (p 141)
The End of Eddy is a first novel by Edouard Louis, a young French author. The book presents a semi-autobiographical story about a young boy growing up in a small town in northern France. The tone is set in the first sentence of the novel. "From my childhood I have no happy memories."
This is a dark book filled with violence and the worst side of humanity, but in spite of that the eponymous hero of the story, a ten-year-old Eddy Bellegueule, manages to survive and eventually escape the home and small town that provide so few happy memories. Louis organizes the book into brief chapters with such titles as “A Man’s Role” and “A Good Education.” The violence the novel examines — though also structural and symbolic — is above all bodily. Eddy's father is a violent man as demonstrated by bar fights, killing new born kittens, and domestic violence. Yet Eddy could not escape this violence at school for "The schoolyard obeyed the same rules as the rest of the world: the big guys kept away from the little ones." This was true except for a couple of the "big guys" who regularly picked on Eddy, not the least because of his effeminate traits in addition to his small size. At home there was poverty as well as violence, although one chapter begins with the observation that Eddy's family is not the poorest in the village -- small consolation.
Eddy's effeminate mannerisms were evident as soon as he learns to speak, his voice takes on feminine inflections. His girlish bearing is involuntary: “I had not chosen my way of walking, the pronounced, much too pronounced, way my hips swayed from side to side, or the shrill cries that escaped my body.” As a teenager, he yearns to be straight. He orders himself to have orgasms to photographs of naked women, rubbing himself until he is raw and blistered. Each morning in the bathroom he chants: “Today I’m gonna be a tough guy.”
The novel is structured in three parts. The first makes up two thirds of the book and presents the village, school, and family in relentless and dispassionate detail. The second part continues Eddy's travails till the point where he makes an unsuccessful attempt to run away from home; an attempt that is made all the more poignant because he enlists his younger brother to tell his parents ensuring that he will be found. The novel concludes with a short epilogue in which Eddy is able to attend a boarding school for the arts. This is a moment that leaves the reader wondering if his life will turn out for the better. In one of the concluding scenes he destroys a jacket that his parents had given him, symbolically breaking the connections with his old life.
The End of Eddy is brutal yet brilliant in portraying the life and inner feelings of a young gay boy who experiences psychic and physical violence on a daily basis. It is a cautionary tale that critically portrays the class system in France as well as the rampant rage, racism, and homophobia. Yet, through it all the author is able to evoke a sensitive portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. This is one of the best first novels I have read.
2 comments:
It is so sad that this is semi - autobiographical. However, books like this need to expose the terrible things that happen in the world. The novel sounds like it is very realistic.
Brian,
Yes, it was sad but also somehow uplifting as Eddy did escape from the small village while still in his teens. The realism is palpable, although disappointing in that it was happening in the late 1990s.
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