Powerful portrayal of the endless brutality of poverty in rural France
Memoir: The End of Eddy, By Édouard Louis (translated by Michael Lucey), Harvill Secker, €17.25
As openers go, they don’t get more bluntly bleak than this: “From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don’t mean to say that I never, in all of those years, felt any happiness or joy. But suffering is all-consuming: it somehow gets rid of anything that doesn’t fit into its system.”
To have acquired this much wisdom in hindsight is one thing, but it’s not often a 19-year-old can recall a ...
