Who Killed My Father -

Édouard Louis

New Directions

2019

96 páginas

3h 12m

ISBN-13: 9780811228503

This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar E´douard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father

This bracing new nonfiction book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father.

Who Killed My Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French―at the minimum―of negligent homicide.

The author goes to visit the ugly gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty years old, who can hardly walk or breathe:“You belong to the category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s as simple as that.

But hand in hand with searing, specific denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son, once damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia. Yet tenderness reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.

Resenhas (2)

5 (Perfeito)

"Is it normal to be ashamed of loving?"

"Masculinity— don’t act like a girl, don’t be a faggot— meant that you dropped out as fast as you could to show everyone you were strong, as soon as you could to show you were rebellious, and so, as far as I can tell, constructing your masculinity meant depriving yourself of any other life, any other future, any other prospect that school might have opened up. Your manhood condemned you to poverty, to lack of money. Hatred of homosexuality = poverty."

"A classic pattern: because you felt that you hadn’t lived your youth to the fullest, you spent your whole life trying to be young."

"Your father doesn’t want to go into his past because the past reminds him that he could have become a different person, and didn’t."

"For the ruling class, in general, politics is a question of aesthetics: a way of seeing themselves, of seeing the world, of constructing a personality. For us it was life or death."

"But because of what they’ve done to your body, you will never have a chance to uncover the person you’ve become."