CANCELLATION OF THE LECTURE DUE TO A SERIOUS FLU ILLNESS
ÉDOUARD LOUIS
IN THE HEART OF VIOLENCE
Édouard Louis, French author
Moderation Isolde Charim, author and philosopher
In his autobiographical novel In the Heart of Violence, bestselling French author Édouard Louis reconstructs the events of a dramatic night that turned his life upside down. He meets a young man on the Place de la République in Paris one December night. He actually wants to go home, but they strike up a conversation. It quickly becomes clear that it is a spontaneous encounter and Édouard takes him, Reda, an immigrant son with roots in Algeria, into his small flat. But what begins as a tender flirtation turns into a night at the end of which Reda threatens Édouard with a gun. By telling of childhood, desire, migration and racism, Louis makes invisible forms of violence visible. A novel that, like The End of Eddy, goes straight to the heart of our present - political, stirring, wide awake.
Édouard Louis was born Eddy Bellegueule in a village in Picardy in 1992, but he gave up this birth name when he left the misery of his parents‘ world to go to Paris. From then on, he called himself Édouard Louis, began studying at the École normale supérieure and became famous in 2014 with the novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy, Fischer 2015). In it, Louis tells of the torment of a homosexual child in the normality of village violence. Both Louis' book and that of sociologist Didier Éribon (Return to Reims), of whom Louis was a student, are considered milieu portraits of the Front National. The work of Parisian sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has strongly influenced both Louis and Éribon. Louis most recently published the novel Histoire de la violence (Éditions du Seuil 2016). Louis wrote a manifesto with Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, which is published in German in the volume Wie wir leben wollen (edited by Matthias Jügler, Suhrkamp 2016).
Édouard Louis‘ book In the Heart of Violence will be published at the end of August 2017
In co-operation with S. Fischer Verlag GmbH
