Collapse: A Novel
About this ebook
Édouard’s brother spent much of his life dreaming. He lived in a poor, working-class world where he imagined that he would become one of the finest butchers in France, that he would travel, that he would make his fortune, that he would restore cathedrals, and that his father, who had disappeared from his life, would return and love him.
But there was no way to escape, no one who could show him how, and everything about him—his drinking, his violence, his behavior toward women and toward other people generally—condemned him.
At thirty-eight, after years of failure and depression, he was found dead on the floor of his single-room apartment. This book is the story of his collapse.
Édouard Louis traces the life of a man who was in many ways deplorable: violent, misogynistic, homophobic, brutal. But where might understanding begin, and how far can it extend? In Collapse, Louis pursues every angle for answers—consulting writers and psychoanalysts and questioning his siblings, his mother, his brother’s partners, and himself. From an outpouring of memory and pain comes a radical gesture of dignity and forgiveness.
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About the author
Édouard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Who Killed My Father, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, Change, and Monique Escapes, and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, and Freeman’s. His books have been translated into thirty languages and have made him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide. He lives in Paris.
Tash Aw is the author of five novels, including, most recently, The South, and a memoir of a Chinese Malaysian family, Strangers on a Pier, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has won a Whitbread Book Award, a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and an O. Henry Prize, and has been translated into twenty-six languages. His translation of Édouard Louis’s A Woman’s Battles and Transformations was short-listed for the TA First Translation Prize.
