Ok. All I can say is this book is not for everyone, definiitely not the faint of heart. This book was gritty, raw and very real. Pulls you in from page one. I have already recommended this read to friends and families. I will be looking to read more from this author. Thanks to NetGalley, the author and the publisher for the ARC of this book. Although I received the book in this manner, it did not affect my opinion of this book nor my review.

Great book but not for the faint of heart. I could not put the book down it had me sucked in from the get go. Someone recommended this book to me and I will def pass the word. My only issue was the switching from victim to another person telling the story. I got lost a few times but other than that a very compelling read

Although short, this is aa dark and challenging read, with echoes of Camus. Not for the faint-hearted.

POSTED ONJUNE 21, 2018 BY NORM SIGURDSON

Book Review – HISTORY OF VIOLENCE by ÉDOUARD LOUIS – Brutal Honesty About Brutal Reality

Édouard Louis’s first novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule, was published in France in 2014, when he was 22 years old, and translated into English last year as The End of Eddy. It is a short but powerful autobiographical novel about Louis’s adolescence and young manhood as an effeminate, book-loving son of working class parents in an impoverished village in northern France.

In that novel Louis wrote about how he had to keep his identity as a gay man hidden in a community of hostile, violent and often drunken bigots. In his second autobiographical novel, published in France in 2016 and now released in English as History of Violence, Louis continues the story.

In 2011 Louis moved to Paris to attend University (the first in his family to do so). On Christmas Eve, 2012, in Paris, while walking home alone after dinner with friends he met a young man of Algerian background and invited him up to his apartment where they had sex. When he discovered that the man was stealing his phone and iPad while leaving, the encounter turned violent and the man strangled Louis almost to death and then raped him at gunpoint.

History of Violence is the story of that terrible evening and the long lasting effects it had on Louis. The story is “fictionalized” not in the sense that facts have been changed, but in the way that Louis chooses to tell it. In the novel Édouard (as the character is called) has returned to his native village a year after the rape and is staying with his sister, Clara, and her husband.

Much of the book is narrated by Clara as she tells her unnamed truck driver husband what Édouard has told her about the attack, while Édouard eavesdrops from the next room. Clara, although sympathetic to her brother, has many of the biases and small-mindedness that Édouard has been trying to escape from and puts her own spin on the story. Édouard meanwhile offers corrections or reveals things to the reader that he didn’t share with Clara.

The layering of the story works well, and there are other perspectives and interpretations added, from the police to whom Édouard reports the crime, the doctors who examine him and from his close circle of gay intellectual friends in Paris.

Édouard’s friends convince him to report the attack to the police and he finds the encounter humiliating and infuriating. The racism of the police is the first jolt.

He describes his attacker and “immediately the officer on duty cut me off: ‘Oh, you mean he was an Arab.’ He was triumphant, delighted would be an exaggeration, but he did smile, he crowed; it was as if I’d given him the confession he’d wanted to hear since I walked in the door, as if I’d given him proof that he was in the right all along; he kept repeating it, ‘the Arab male, the Arab male,’ every other sentence involved ‘the Arab male.'”

Ironically, Édouard knows that his attacker, who gave his name as Reda, is actually a French born son of Algerian Berbers who himself hates Arabs and also used racial slurs against them. But to the police all North Africans are “Arabs.”

Then there is their not so subtle blaming of Édouard himself for the situation: “He asked me: ‘Wait— you brought a stranger up to your apartment, in the middle of the night?’ I answered: ‘But everybody does that…,’ and in an ironic, mocking, sarcastic voice, he asked, ‘Everybody?’ It wasn’t a question. Obviously, he wasn’t asking me whether or not everybody did that, he was saying nobody did that. Or at least, not everybody. So finally I answered, ‘What I mean is, people like me…’”

Louis’s descriptions of the attack and the rape itself are harrowing but the impersonal and often brutal physical exam that Édouard undergoes is equally difficult reading.

The subject of rape and the victimization of women who report being raped has been covered often in fiction. The subject of male rape is less well travelled territory.

There are similarities but as Louis shows there is also the added issue of confused feelings around learned ideas of masculinity. By filtering his story through the voice of Clara, who represents the homophobic mindset of his childhood home, Louis allows Édouard to reflect on his own sense of shame and helplessness.

He also has the chance in his own comments on Clara’s narrative to explore his attraction to danger and his strange protectiveness of Reda. Édouard knows that he could simply have let Reda leave with his stolen goods but chose confrontation instead (the “masculine” response) and tries to find ways to explain away Reda’s actions while still hating him.

I found History of Violence  to be a complex, many layered narrative that explores a difficult subject with honesty and bravery. Its subject matter is at times hard to stare down but Louis’s honesty and bravery make it compelling without being voyeuristic.

By the way, one final odd (and purely accidental) layer is that the novel is sensitively translated by Lorin Stein, the former editor-in-chief of The Paris Review, who was famously forced to resign last year after he faced multiple accusations of sexual impropriety on the job.

History of Violence by Édouard Louis (translated by Lorin Stein) Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US and Canada) Harvill Secker (UK) 224pp.

https://booknormblog.com/2018/06/21/book-review-history-of-violence-by-edouard-louis-brutal-honesty-about-brutal-reality/

This book was rather hard to follow. The point of view kept switching from the victim to some other narrator (never could figure out who that was) and story switched from past to present and back again. It was hard to be sure when, where, and who was talking.

A dark and painful subject - obviously not fun reading.

This book was a disorganized mess. Maybe it is supposed to be that way because that is how the inside of his head is, but it makes for terrible story telling.

This is definitely not an easy read. That being said, I am glad I read it. History of Violence tells the story of the author's experience with violence and how it impacted his life. It is a sad story, but also a hopeful one. The writing was elegant and the author's considerations thought-provoking. Recommended!