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At 33, French novelist Édouard Louis has already seen all seven of his novels translated into English. In its first history, Eddy’s end (2017), and in Change it (2024), wrote about being a promising child of a poor family, a troubled son who became a best-selling author. Many of his other books have presented images of his parents in charity: a father destroyed by physical labor, victimized by medical care in France and the reduction of housing allowances, and a mother who, after raising many children in poverty, ran away from her father Louis and later, in Monique Escapes, published earlier this year, her successor as an abuser. Now, in Collapse, translated by novelist Tash Aw, Louis describes the death of his older brother, aged 38, from problems related to alcoholism.
“I did not hear anything about the announcement of my brother’s death,” he begins; “not sadness, or despair, or joy, or joy; The reasons for his coldness soon become apparent. His brother was very homophobic. His drinking once prevented Louis from sleeping through an important exam. After The End of Eddy, his brother went looking for him with a baseball bat. So when Louis talks to his mother and sister about how to pay for his brother’s funeral and admits, “yes, I would have let him be buried like a dog”, we understand why.
The fall takes the form of a metaphysical investigation into the decline of the plate. Louis said that the book was in various sketches a play, a diary and a manifesto – experiments that can be seen in the final product, which has a restrained knowledge of the types including the testimony of the witness, the dialogue written between the author and the spirit of his brother and the main events that are presented as readable points.
Longtime readers of Louis will be familiar with his politics. His brother, who was caught in the difficult trap of many people, did not stand a chance. “Your brother was a victim of alcoholism more than anything else,” she told him. “It’s a story of collective destiny that you’re talking about before anything else,” says another. But these thoughts are too difficult for Louis. He wrote: “My friends have clear ideas but I don’t know, I don’t know.
Coming to new ideas, he turns to literature: Catullus, Freud, Foucault, Joan Didion. His reading helps Louis find the distance he needs to think about his brother in new ways, and in the course of Collapse he appears again as a tragically calm person. Louis describes his life in terms of “Destiny” and “Injustice” and writes about his brother’s “Wound”, a word that evokes not only the psychoanalytic work he mentions but the incurable wound of Amfortas, pierced by the Holy Spear, in Wagner’s Parsifal. Although it is well-known, Louis’s brother’s wound cannot be cured.
The wound was caused by the divorce of the boy’s parents – he and Louis share a mother but have different fathers – and is aggravated by his father’s rejection and death, and by alcoholism. Louis’ mother remembers a drawing her brother made as a child of “a river of blood, he never forgot the bodies or the coffins that floated on the imaginary river”. The pain doesn’t go away. He does not trust the women he has; he blames his drinking for his low self-esteem. A wound is a fatal flaw, an insurmountable obstacle. Louis writes: “My brother’s life was like a body struggling in the sand. At his death, his mother fainted – the appearance of surgery that corresponds to the tragic events that are taking place.”
Read next to Monique Escapes, Louis’ latest shows himself as the darker half of the equation that also has more optimism. Although his brother could not escape the cycle he was caught in and it took his death to create a redemptive idea for his life, Louis’ mother Monique proved that he can forgive and grow. He sees in his son’s work how books cannot be a means of revenge, of challenging a person in his difficulties, and of liberation. Indeed, his escape, as his son, said, is made possible by his success in writing – and to his house in Paris where he fled; it is money from his writings that keeps him in his house.
But the most important thing is that he still remembers his future. “Through her, I have found the joy of writing someone else’s work,” said Louis at the end of the book Monique Escapes. “I am used to the joy that accompanies disappearing, showing myself, being a mere reflection of my future… Nothing in literature has given me such joy.” Although Louis has said that Collapse is the closest to writing his family saga, it is hard to believe that we have seen the end of Monique.
