History of Violence

The radical, urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy - a personal and powerful story of violence ** Shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award ** The radical, urgent new novel from the author of The End of Eddy - a personal and powerful story of violence. I met Reda on Christmas Eve 2012, at around four in the morning. He approached me in the street, and finally I invited him up to my apartment. He told me the story of his childhood and how his father had come to France, having fled Algeria. We spent the rest of the night together, talking, laughing. At around 6 o'clock, he pulled out a gun and said he was going to kill me. He insulted me, strangled and raped me. The next day, the medical and legal proceedings began. History of Violence retraces the story of that night, and looks at immigration, class, racism, desire and the effects of trauma in an attempt to understand a history of violence, its origins, its reasons and its causes. 'It stays with you' Times 'A heartbreaking novel' John Boyne

About the Author :
douard Louis is the author of The End of Eddy, History of Violence, Who Killed My Father, A Woman's Battles and Transformations and Change, and the editor of a book on the social scientist Pierre Bourdieu. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, making him one of the most celebrated writers of his generation worldwide.

Review :
Louis’s greatest strength as a writer is that he feels things so passionately, sometimes to the point of obsession, but that he also has a philosophical turn of mind that explores, rather than neutralises, his feelings. [B]oth brave and ambitious in its determination never to let its reader, or its author, escape lightly the damaging realities it describes. [A] harrowing piece of autofiction… History of Violence is a slim but densely layered novel that begins with raw urgency. [A] heartbreaking novel… I find myself captivated by Édouard Louis's books and his raw honesty. An intense and uncomfortably thrilling book, which uses the harrowing events of that Christmas Eve as a basis for a wider exploration of class, race and individualism... a novel that is unflinching in its examination of class and discrimination. [Louis] writes with this amazing honesty and fantastically uncensored, brutal, beautiful clarity. A painful and astonishing book, it tells the story of that night and its aftermath with ruthless poise and clinical precision… With almost superhuman compassion and moral courage, Louis traces the origins of Reda’s suffering by reconstructing his father’s story. History of Violence…pack[s] total immersion and cool detachment into a single page. As translator, Lorin Stein keeps faith with its rawness — and its refinement. [A] provocative, incendiary and stunning second book. Once more, Édouard Louis has given us something unique; a book so direct, shocking and moving it is like holding live fire in one's hands as the pages turn. Like all great writers, he shows us something of the self so that we might better understand something of the world.