Beautifully written and deeply compassionate.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced reading copy.

Enjoyed and appreciated this very much! Has stayed with me for several years since reading. The use of broken French is well conveyed in this translation.

Loved this book. It was one of my favourite titles but did not have time to write a full review before it was archived.

I had the pleasure of meeting the author at the Chester Literature Festival. I'd looked forward to this for so long, and I relished every word...

This first-person narrative is beautifully written and shows the inner life of the child who can never fit in.

I didn't enjoy the story, which was simply too shockingly carnal for my taste, but I did appreciate the atmospheric scenes and the innate truth of the memories.

A fascinating insight into rural French life and the homophobia experienced by the protagonist. I kept having to remind myself that this was set in the 1990s, and not early 1900s. A great coming of age short story, based on the author's life.

Beautiful, powerful writing, quite devastating at times, but ultimately uplifting.

Unfortunately this one wasn't for me and I didn't continue reading for any significant time therefore, do not feel justified to comment.

It may have been just bad timing but I couldn't get into the style of writing.
Although I did not finish the book and don't feel justified to give feedback or a review I will still be able to recommend it to customers visiting our bookstore.

Thankyou for approving my request to read it as I have definitely been able to take something from it for referral purposes to customers.

While interesting and well wrought, it did not engage my emotional side and so may have missed its opportunity to improve its impact. Nevertheless, as an insight into rural French life for one who does not fit in it is superb.

Undeniably grim and yet no worse than other 'misery memoirs', but written in a more matter of fact way, without piling on the agony. The shocking thing is that it's not taking place in the 1950s or in some backward country, but in France in the 1990s/early 2000s. Perhaps a good indication of the background of many Le Pen voters.
Interesting to compare this with the film 'Moonlight'.

I was unsure when I started reading what I was going to think, and what to expect. The story of a young boy, confused by his own sexuality in a backward town in northern France. I felt I was reading about the 1960s or 1970s before I realised it was much more modern. Hard to believe such entrenched gender stereotypes still exist, yet this is autobiographical. Young Eddy Belleguele is never going to thrive and reach his potential in a town and family where brutishness is celebrated in the menfolk, and girls leave their dreams behind on the supermarket checkouts. Eddy is a mystery and a worry to his parents - he is different. He has effeminate mannerisms and voice, and they just don't get him. The book sees Eddy trying hard to fit in with what is expected of a boy. We know from the narration that he got away and presume he is living his life of choice as an adult. I found it difficult at times to put things together, chronologically there appeared to be jumping about. One minute we were reading of a 10 year old, the next thing it was about girlfriends. They do seem very sexually advanced for their years in this French town - I was quite horrified! A strange but compelling read.

I read this book in two sittings and found it incredibly sad. At times I thought I'd read enough and could not imagine how Edouard had endured his childhood. He must be a very strong man.

Thank you Netgalley for my copy.

This was quick and easy yet highly thought provoking. Louis has written an incredibly angry book that displays his youth, but in doing so has created something challenging. Growing up at a similar time to me in a small village there are elements of his stories I can relate to, particularly the feeling of generations repeating themselves and the cultural divide with those new to the area. Clearly some of his experiences are extreme, be they the sex games (wow) to the violence, but as a political statement I am interested to see what he does next.

A strange, sad and beautiful little book. It may shock some, but it is also impossible to forget.

‘The End of Eddy’ by Édouard Louis is a semi-autobiographical novel set in a deprived rural community in Picardy in northern France. Translated by Michael Lucey, it is a coming of age tale about Eddy Bellegueule (the author’s real name) and his life at home and at school in the late 1990s and 2000s. Eddy is gay and struggles to conform to what is widely perceived to be an acceptable type of masculinity in the small village where he is expected to go to work in the factory as soon as he leaves school. His mannerisms are routinely mocked by his peers and his family, particularly his father who even chose Eddy’s name because it sounds American and more “tough guy”. ‘The End of Eddy’ garnered lots of attention in France because Louis published his debut novel in 2014 when he was just 21 years old. However, aside from Louis’s young age and the unflinching descriptions of Eddy exploring his sexuality, ‘The End of Eddy’ also deserves acclaim more generally for articulating the reality of social exclusion in modern-day France so convincingly. Many thanks to Harvill Secker for sending me a review copy via NetGalley.

The End of Eddy by Edouard Louis, translated by Michael Lucey.

Édouard Louis’s 'The End of Eddy', translated by Michael Lucey, tells the autobiographical story of Eddy Bellegueule (the novel was initially published as 'En finir avec Eddy Bellegeule') through selected scenes from Eddy’s childhood in a small village in Picardy before Eddy deliberately changed his name, and his mode of being, to Edouard Louis. The culture of the village, and Eddy’s young life, is hyper-masculine and working class. Eddy’s family is poor, scraping money together, and the four TVs in the house were all fished out of the tip and patched back into working order by Eddy’s father. Work in the village revolves around the factories which slowly kill or irreparably damage several of the people the reader is introduced to, or, for women, in the provision of social care. The expectations and dreams of the children in the village go through a slow downgrade. Surgeon to GP to nurse to nurse assistant to pharmacist to care assistant. And whilst there is nothing on this earth wrong with being a care assistant, Louis is at pains to note that the depressing force of that reduction in expectations is ingrained in the village and its inhabitants. There’s no point in encouraging people to aim for more because there is no chance of success. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Drinking, fighting, and behaving ‘like a man’ are the accepted social norms and Eddy is aware from a very young age that he is never going to meet them successfully. His mannerisms and the register of his voice separate him at first sight and sound from his peers. He tries, unsuccessfully, to alter his mannerisms, to pretend to enjoy football, to find girls sexually appealing, but it can only ever be a charade and not a very convincing one at that.

Louis writes with great calmness and precision about his parents. His father is a racist, homophobic bully, but he rarely hits his children – setting him apart from his own father and all the other fathers in the book – and he defends Eddy on several occasions. His mother laments the opportunities she missed by becoming pregnant at seventeen and missing any chance she had of escaping. Neither of them particularly value education but Eddy needs to remain in school because otherwise they will lose his family allowance and the precarious nature of the family finances won’t allow that. Eddy wins his battle to go to the lycée in Amiens rather than nearby Abbeville. He has to live in because it’s too far to commute and the beginning of Eddy’s escape starts. His father reluctantly drives him to the train station for his interview, warning him to stay safe in Amiens which is full of Arabs, driving it home just how different Amiens and Hallencourt are.

Michael Lucey’s translation skills deserve to be highlighted as well as Louis’s own writing. Lucey translates the venacular Picardian into an easily recognisable English vernacular, as well as Louis’ more academic French into a similar English register. Louis’s debt to Bourdieu and Foucault are acknowledged on the page and the book slides with impressive ease between the two way of writing and thinking about life. There is no space for academic or philosophical self-interrogation in Hallencourt but Louis’ distance from it – in both space and time – allows it to be present on the page and Lucey’s skills as a translator bring both that very French mode of reflexive sociological analysis and the presentation of French Northern working class life to the Anglophone reader.

"We are always playing roles and there is a certain truth to masks. The truth of my mask was this will to exist differently". The story of Eddie is, unfortunately, all too real in the history of young men battling with coming to terms with their sexuality. The setting is a small French village and at times it seems like it must be taking place in the far, distant past. However, the mention of mobile phones and multiple TVs bring us sharply into the present day. Eddie is tortured and shunned for his effeminate ways and is clearly gay though he spends his life trying to deny it. His parents are intolerant and there is a prevalent macho attitude in the village which accepts and encourages bullying and abuse. Eddie;s self repression is heartbreaking. "I can't stop asking myself, years later, what the real meaning of complicity is, what the boundaries are that separate complicity from active participation". This is an important book in terms of young gay men and women and the realisation that though we tell ourselves that attitudes have changed, in many places they haven't and young people are still suffering homophobic bullying.

It’s difficult enough for many gay people to come out, but for a boy to grow up gay in a working class family in rural France presents its own unique challenges. Eddy, the hero of debut author Édouard Louis’s semi-autobiographical novel, comes of age in the late 90s and early 2000s in a large family that treads close to the poverty line. Almost all the young men in their small town within the Picardy region work in the local factory once they are legally allowed to leave school at an early age. They are expected to conform to a certain type of masculinity: hard-drinking, aggressive and sexually voracious. For naturally effeminate Eddy this presents a problem at an early age when he’s branded a “faggot” – a label he can never shrug off no matter how hard he works to self consciously appear to be a tough guy. His perceptive story recounts the themes and individuals he contends with during his development towards becoming an adult who eventually accepts his nature and finds a place where he can achieve a sense of belonging. It’s filled with the brutal and intimate reality of his journey and makes statements which are at once deeply emotional and highly political.

It’s striking how for much of his early childhood Eddy is well-liked and admired for the things which make his personality unique: polite, intelligent and creative. Yet, at a certain point, these qualities don’t fit into the standard behavior associated with young men. He’s mocked by his family, friends and the other children at school – two of whom regularly and brutally bully him. Having no way to defend himself against these attacks he resolves (in a way he later realizes is akin to Jean Genet) “I thought it would be better if I seemed like a happy kid. So I became the staunchest ally of this silence, and, in a certain way, complicit in this violence.” This is the point at which his life becomes sharply divided; there is the private life and the public face he shows to the rest of the world. Rather than living freely and naturally he becomes self consciousness and begins to modify his behavior to try to conform to those around him. Of course, it doesn’t work. It leads only to humiliation, secrecy and painful self-loathing. All he wants is to fit in, but he’s uniformly rejected.

While things are often difficult for any queer teen navigating through a largely heterosexual society, there are unique hardships for those from a socio-economic background like Eddy’s. He and the people around him have been excluded from the narrative of society. The working class are often ignored and scorned. The author proposes that this causes many to become insular and disdain any “outsiders” or the values of mainstream intellectual society: “To philosophise meant talking like the class enemy, the haves, the rich folk.” It leads to intense levels of homophobia as well as racism and sexism. Eddy concludes that “the crime was not having done something, it was being something. And especially, looking like one of them.” The “them” are the people who don’t conform to the conventional masculine mode which is stringently reinforced in every aspect of this working class community. Because the novel is written in retrospect from the point when Eddy has become Édouard, he’s able to understand the context of his upbringing. However, the physical and emotional pain from his difficult and warped development remain sharp in his memory. The author thoughtfully unpacks the social milieu of Eddy’s life which leads him to feeling like he has no options to leave or find support elsewhere because this is the only home he knows.

There are certain kinds of trauma from which a person can never recover from. Eddy’s many justified grievances will no doubt remain with him throughout his life and the anger he feels is palpable in this narrative. Not only was his self worth viciously lowered by trying desperately to conform, but he suffered numerous painful injustices. These ranged from being mocked by his mother for having asthma while she stubbornly smoked around him to the broken window in his bedroom which was left unrepaired for the majority of his teenage years. Then there are the atrocious contradictions of the people around him. He engaged in willing sexual activities with his male cousin and friends, yet he is the one publicly shamed for participating where the others are not. Also, his father’s homophobia and racism which he continuously vocalizes are forgotten on a couple of occasions when presented with a real gay person at a party or a black man he befriends in another city. Nevertheless, at home his father continued to berate him for his effeminate nature. At times the story feels all the more painful for the way it relates these details as the narrator struggles to make intellectual sense of them while holding the full fury of his emotions at bay.

It feels important that we have more books like “The End of Eddy” which pay tribute to the perspective of those who have been excluded from mainstream society. Notably, novels by Lisa McInerny and Kerry Hudson also sympathetically address this point of view. With the advent of Brexit and when many first world nations are voting in deeply conservative leaders, it’s the voice of the working class who have been rendered voiceless. Most often it’s their vote which influences government policy to become more insular and conservative in focus. At least, this seems to be the perspective which Zadie Smith proposed in her article ‘Fences’ published in The New York Review. It’s also vital that we continue to have more stories from younger queer generations such as Chinelo Okparanta’s “Under the Udala Trees” and Garrard Conley’s “Boy Erased” where homosexuals still feel intensely pressured to live as heterosexuals. Luckily Eddy was able to eventually go to university, accept his nature and articulate his experience, but there must be countless people like Eddy who have fatally never been able to leave or speak about their constrictive circumstances. However – and this is really important - you don’t need to read “The End of Eddy” because it’s worthy. Read it because it’s a devastatingly honest and moving story in itself.

Edouard Louis’ autobiographical novel was published when he was just 21 and created quite a literary storm in his native France. It tells the story of young Eddy, born into a working class family in a poor area of northern France where he has an almost unbearable childhood, one in which deprivation, alcoholism, bullying, violence, prejudice, racism, unemployment and homophobia are the stuff of everyday life. This type of French underclass life is not often portrayed in French literature and is all the more shocking for that. This bleak existence in a French factory town doesn’t ultimately defeat Eddy who somehow manages to escape it at the end of the book. In spite of some pretty harrowing scenes I could never quite engage with Eddy, and it is possible that he exaggerated the cruelty and bleakness of his life for literary effect. It is, of course, a novel so doesn’t have to be faithful to the truth. And as a portrait of male working-class culture it certainly feels authentic. Whatever the reality of his childhood it was by no means an easy or pleasant one and I am glad he found a way out. Definitely worth reading to discover an aspect of contemporary life in a France rarely seen or experienced by outsiders.

Eddy certainly doesn't have his troubles to seek being gay in rural France. What is surprising is that he should be facing these traumas at the end of the 20th century. His grim living conditions and the unrelenting bullying he faces at school paint a pretty damning picture of not only his community but also of the seeming French obsession with men having to appear "macho". Don't expect a light read but you'll marvel at Eddy's ability to rise above all the troubles he faces each day. Edouard Louis is to be congratulated on the absolute integrity of his writing.