The end of Eddy

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The end of Eddy

Title:

The end of Eddy

Author:

Louis, Édouard, author.

Lucey, Michael, 1960- translator.

Summary:

Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different -- "girlish," intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men. The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening.

General Note:

First published in French as En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (Paris : Éditions du Seuil, 2014).

Edition:

First Picador edition.

Physical Description:

192 pages ; 20 cm

Subject Term:

Young men -- Fiction.

Adolescence -- Fiction.

Working poor -- Fiction.

Gender identity -- Fiction.

Gay men -- Fiction.

Geographic Term:

Picardy (France) -- Fiction.

Author(s):

Lucey, Michael, 1960-

Publisher:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

Publication Date:

2018

ISBN:

9781250181992

Publication Information:

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Call Number:

LOUIS

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003329888	Adult Fiction	LOUIS	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.

"Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy. " Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different--"girlish," intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.

Already translated into twenty-nine languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result--a critical and popular triumph--has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.

Author Notes

Born Eddy Bellegueule in Hallencourt, France, in 1992, Édouard Louis is a novelist 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 .

Michael Lucey is a professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust and The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality , and has translated Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this excellent autobiographical novel, a middle school boy struggles to forge an identity in a French industrial town hostile in every way to his homosexuality. Beset on all sides by violent bullying, verbal ridicule, and a lack of familial support, Eddy Bellegueule has devoted himself, despite his high voice and effeminate mannerisms, to becoming a "tough guy" like his unemployed father. A series of heartbreaking setbacks occurs, including two failed relationships with women, which culminates with Eddy's mother discovering him in a compromising sexual situation. The story finally leads to a powerful farewell scene between Eddy and his father, a momentary demonstration of devotion inextricable from the years of pain that the man has caused the boy. Already translated into 20 languages, this concise novel adroitly captures the downstream effects of reactionary rural culture, heightened by the rise of hard-right ideology and the destabilization of the working class in contemporary Europe, granting its reader an extraordinary portrait of trauma and escape. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, the Wylie Agency. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Review

Louis was born in a factory town in northern France with the name of his narrator, Eddy Bellegueule, a real tough guy's name (bellegueule means, roughly, "beautiful trap," with trap here meaning mouth). But anguished young Eddy is no tough guy, instead suffering constant bullying for his so-called fancy ways; even his parents call him pussy, the worst insult they could deliver. In a place where men are expected to be men and women and children can expect to be belted into submission, Eddy is the relentlessly targeted outsider disproving the adage that names can never hurt you and suffering real beatings besides. Fighting panic attacks, skirting his tormentors, trying to get it on with girls before "losing the battle between my desire to become a tough guy and the desire of my own body," Eddy finally finds a convincing and satisfying way to triumph, if imperfectly. VERDICT An autobiographical first novel that made Louis a star in France and an international sensation, this work is occasionally repetitious but ultimately deeply affecting. [See Prepub Alert, 12/1/16.] © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.