Brutal youth

Édouard Louis’ first novel, “The End of Eddy,” opens with a stark declaration: “From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don’t mean to say that I never, in all those years, felt any happiness or joy. But suffering is all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of anything that doesn’t fit into its system.” For the young French writer, suffering is a colonizer, swallowing up and making its own all that is alien to it.

Louis’ second and latest novel, “History of Violence,” ends with a passage from the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész: “By writing I am seeking pain, the most acute possible, wellnigh intolerable pain, most likely because pain is truth, and as to what constitutes truth … truth is what consumes you.” The consuming nature of suffering (and of truth, which for Kertész and Louis are largely synonymous) sets the stage for “The End of Eddy” and closes the curtains on “History of Violence.”

Taken together, the two form a diptych on suffering — exploring how suffering writes our lives and how, through writing, we might reimagine suffering. As Louis puts it in “History of Violence,” “I’ve often felt most free in moments when I could lie, and by lying I mean resist a truth that was forced on me.” To lie, to fictionalize, to write, is to wrestle a form of freedom, temporary and imperfect though it may be, from the profound unfreedom of suffering. It’s to consume the ultimate consumer, to metabolize the suffering that wants to metabolize us.

Louis, not yet 26, a queer man raised in a homophobic culture, has suffered greatly, and this suffering makes itself felt in his novels. Like “The End of Eddy,” “History of Violence” is a work

History of Violence

of autofiction, taking its incidents from Louis’ own life. In “The End of Eddy,” we read about Louis’ escape from a brutal, bookless childhood in Picardy, a hollowed-out region in the north of France with few jobs and many social ills. It’s a novel about queerness as shame (Louis is spit upon and beaten) and queerness as liberation — the thing that pushes him out of Picardy and toward Paris and the life of an artist.

The suffering described in “History of Violence,” also autobiographical in nature, is even greater. In it, Louis obsessively considers an incident from a Christmas Eve a few years back. Walking home from dinner, Louis met a Kabyle man named Reda. They chatted; they went upstairs together; they had sex.

Then, unexpectedly, things turned violent: Feeling his honor impugned and perhaps ashamed by his own sexuality, Reda almost choked Louis to death and raped him. Afterward, Louis went to the police and washed his apartment with antiseptic wipes and bleach, masking Reda’s scent with cologne. But such violence can’t be erased so easily. For Louis, violence is, by its very nature, ineradicable. It lives on, corrosive and poisonous; the best we can hope for is not to repeat it ourselves.

In Lorin Stein’s brutal and precise translation, Louis recounts the unmooring brought about by this violent experience. Language offered Louis a route out of Picardy and into a new identity. Here, it fails as he experiences the inarticulable: “If language is the essence of being human, then for those fifty seconds when he was killing me I don’t know what I was.” If to be without language is to be nonhuman, then in “History of Violence” Louis attempts to rehumanize himself by reintegrating himself into language, by speaking the unspeakable.

“History of Violence” regularly concerns itself with to whom stories belong and what work they do — for the victimized, for the victimizer, even for the state. Structurally, the novel alternates between a retelling of the events by Louis’ sister, Clara, and Louis’ internal responses to her. (As the novel opens, he’s hiding on the other side of a door, listening as Clara speaks to her husband.)

The police tell one story: They mischaracterize Reda as an Arab and see this as an example of immigrant criminality. Clara tells another story, Louis another still. He wants to believe that “the whole thing happened in a stumbling, accidental, hesitating way, without any premeditation,” that he wasn’t Reda’s mark but an accidental victim.

He knows this might not be true, but he wants to claim it is anyway. To lie is to achieve some freedom over circumstance, and that’s what Louis tries to do here: “I’ve been trying to construct a memory that would let me undo the past, that would amplify it and destroy it, so that the more I remember and the more I lose myself in the images that remain, the less they have to do with me.” In this harrowing work, we don’t just tell ourselves stories in order to live. We tell ourselves stories in order to survive.

Anthony Domestico is the books columnist for Commonweal and the author of “Poetry and Theolog y in the Modernist Period,” published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Email: books@sfchronicle.com Makkai’s compulsively readable novel mows back and forth across decades, during the catastrophic AIDS crisis and latterly as terrorism begins making routine claims on daily realities.

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