Literature and music: Dimitri Stapfer reads Louis

It is precisely with their ballads that the indie rock band The National has played its way into the hearts of their fans. And so their guitarist and pianist Bryce Dessner, who holds the Creative Chair as a contemporary composer this season, probably did not wish for the heartbreakingly brutal world bestseller book "The End of Eddy" as a literary bracket to his compositions by chance. In it, the French author Edouard Louis tells of his childhood and youth. And about what it was like to live as an outcast among outcasts: Namely, as a homosexual boy in the provincial precariat.
Even more shocking than the brutality of his classmates is the psychological and physical coercion Eddy puts himself through in order to "normalise" his body and bend it into heterosexuality. And around him, the parents and siblings break down because of their poverty, they crumble in the provincial ruins against the abysses of capital.
Together with Didier Eribon and the Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, Edouard Louis belongs to the French triumvirate of the autobiographical novel, which short-circuits the ego and society in literary-sociological terms and captures them in poignant scenes with which the repressed misery burns itself into the heart and brain of the reader.

Translated with DeepL.com