Book Review | Indictment of patriarchy and politicians: you made my father a living body, writes Éduard Louis

Culture|Book review

Novel

Éduard Louis: Who killed my father (Qui a tué mon Père). Lotta Toivanen, Finland. Oak. 76 s.

Two is above all in terms of the bitterness and anger known towards the father: Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007).

Kafka ‘s indictment A letter to the father paints a chilling picture of a tyrant, beneath which are permanent damage to the boy’s mental landscape. There is no forgiveness.

Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander the character of a monstrous heartless bishop draws the director from the trauma caused by his own preaching father. A memoir Laterna Magica on the basis of which father hatred grows even as the driving force behind all of Bergman’s artistic, often anxious, wrinkling work.

But it is Hermann Kafkaa also characterized delicate and kind as a man, and reportedly Erik Bergman was a priest quite held by his parishioners.

Yet the truth about family, emotion, and art cannot be disputed by other views — perhaps even fairer ones, so to speak. Not even in doubt.

Will the Frenchman rise Eduard Louisin (b. 1992) father as a third member of this horror gallery?

That could be it think Louis an autobiographical debut novel Not anymore Eddy (from 2014, in Finnish 2019), when the father now gets the bulk of the poverty in the third work of a young man who rose to international renown Who killed my father.

However, it is worth noting that there is no question mark in the title of the work. It is not needed, for in the boy’s view, the father was already dead while he was alive.

And not even my own son can hate that. Pity and mourn, yes, love a little. Maybe even a lot, if only there was some way to show affection.

Rather than novel novelty is a case report that connects Émile Zolan revolutionized the anti-Semitic Dreyfus case J’accusein the tradition of journalism (1898). Not a single measure of Louis ’work is far more than Zola’s text.

Both texts are definitely larger in size.

Louis lists the French state leaders whose political decisions forced his father, who was seriously injured in his factory work, to endure as a street sweeper. The small cuts in social benefits meant huge drops for the father as well as a gradual depletion of vital functions.

The father of his thoughts had already exhausted himself in the days of his physical strength. All he had to do was swallow the crude masculine model forced by the patriarchy as a guideline for his existence.

According to it, vulnerability and weakness can only be shown with fists.

Louis will not fall use the expired definition of victim. Maybe because it also has a positive dimension: something is crushed so that something else can grow.

In Louis ’view, overemphasized masculinity destroys men themselves, women, children, and families alike. Only the pain increases.

Mitigating expressions are not part of his grammar.

There is also a day when Dad gets his head violently at home from his big brother. There is nothing sweet about revenge.

However, the busiest dumb cry is flooded with a scene where the narrator just wants his father to look at him at a rare little family party. But the father turns his gaze away because he does not accept the femininity of his son.

About school violence just a great novel Destruction published Iida Rauma calls his work in the subtitle For a case report (HS 30.1). The point is to look at something that is happening in the wider world through a single case study.

Louis ’case is, above all, connected to how the young selves are not seen. It causes permanent marks. He is not as he is to his so-called loved one, so a connection between them can never be established.

And even the book that was originally published in 2018 will eventually change nothing. As Louis immediately writes on the first page Lotta Toivanen in Finnish:

“The fact that only the boy speaks is detrimental to both of them: the father is not given the opportunity to tell about his own life, and the boy is left without the answer he needs.”

The father, who has long been an iron-faced horror, remains an enigmatic lukewarm spot as an individual, as the cover of the book already shows.

But what else could anyone try to tell him what has happened to him. Even some of the torment when your own life and body have been subordinate to another.

In that respect, the novelty reproduces Éduard Louis ’previous novel History of violence (Finnish 2016) sadly an eternal theme: others shape my story.