Édouard Louis, _Histoire de la violence_

HISTOIRE MAY BE translated into English both as "history" and as "story."  The official translation, I see, went with "history," which is certainly defensible, but let's consider that the book is about a story and about whom stories belong to.

The title page notes that Histoire de la violence is a roman, a novel, but apparently it is autobiographical. Louis was on his way home from visiting friends on Christmas Eve when he fell in with a handsome, interesting stranger. He brought the stranger up to his place, and things went smoothly enough for a few hours, but when Louis emerges after a quick shower, it appears the stranger has taken and concealed Louis's phone and tablet. Louis tries as diplomatically as he can to get the stranger to return the items, but things take a bad turn. The stranger assaults Louis, rapes him, threatens to kill him, and actually does attempt to strangle him. The attacker relents, though, and Louis gets out. He goes back to his friends' apartment, goes to a clinic, eventually is persuaded to go to the police, files a complaint. Some months later, still badly shaken, he visits his hometown in the provinces to stay with his sister for a while and recover.  

All this is skillfully and memorably narrated, with little if any bitterness and recrimination. But more remarkable, I'd say, than Louis's ability to tell the story is his purposeful rearrangement of the chronology of the events. When the book opens, for example, he is on his way home from filing the complaint with the police. As he recalls his being questioned, we see that for the police, Louis's story is one more tale of what Arabs get up to, even though Louis insists, repeatedly, that his attacker was a Kabyle, not an Arab. We know more about this sort of thing than you do, they insist.

By p. 12, we skip ahead a bit in time and are at his sister Clara's place, and Louis is overhearing his sister tell her husband the story of the attack. But for Clara, Louis's story is principally about what happens when you turn your back on your hometown and family and head off to the seductions of Paris.

Louis's departures from chronological order not only create a different kind of anticipation and suspense, but also highlight the ways in which Louis's story gets picked up and re-purposed by others.

The ironies keep piling up. To Reda, the attacker, Louis probably seemed a typical enough fortunate son of Paris...not at all someone who had to claw his way out of a dead-end working-class small town. Though not in the same way Reda is, Louis is an outsider in Paris, too.

The novel (or auto-fiction?) becomes Louis's way of reclaiming his story, peeling off the weedy tendrils of ownership that are growing over it like kudzu as others re-tell the story to align with their own sense of things.

Édouard Louis put me a little in mind of Lucien Chardon in Balzac's Les Illusions Perdues--another young man from the provinces who takes his literary gifts to the capital. He changes his name to Lucien de Rubempré  (Édouard Louis was once Eddy Bellegueule) and ends up dealing with both opportunities and perils he could not have imagined.

Geoffroy de Lagasnerie seems like a much nicer man than Vautrin, though.