Louis arrived in Amiens after fleeing the cruelty of life as a closeted teenager in Hallencourt. Louis, in turn, likes to flip the question around: Had he not left Hallencourt, received the best education available in France and altered the way he spoke, ate and dressed, would French literary circles have expressed such profuse empathy toward him? Would they have cared at all? “It was a literary bomb,” the philosopher and sociologist Didier Eribon, a close friend of Louis’s, told me, that upset the routine “navel-gazing of the cultural bourgeoisie.” Since then, some in France have questioned whether this precocious award-winning author, whose works have been translated into two dozen languages and adapted for the stage by Europe’s most prestigious directors, is really qualified to speak for those he left behind. His first novel, “The End of Eddy,” became an international best seller and has been most accurately described as a “nonfiction novel.” In it, Louis recounted the desolate poverty he experienced growing up in the tiny village of Hallencourt, 20 miles from Amiens, in the remote reaches of France’s postindustrial north. The boundaries of the self are central to the three novels that Louis has published since 2014, and perhaps even more central to understanding the prodigious reception they’ve had in France. Louis concurred, though with a faint cry of protest: “I’m not at all the type of person to open a window,” he said. Caillat asked if he could swing open the giant window to film Louis leaning out over town. Occasionally, you could see the drama student’s checklist reel through his mind: He would straighten his spine, press his shoulders back and down as he looked into the camera. His sentences are punctuated with a lighthearted, reassuring laugh. He seems, however, to have skirted the complicated psychological dynamics that youthful fame can inflict. He is also one of France’s most widely read and internationally successful novelists. They requested a sound test, and Louis, who attended a performing-arts high school in Amiens, sang a short tune, an old song by the ’70s French pop star Daniel Balavoine called “The Singer”: “I want to succeed in life, be loved, be beautiful, earn money/Above all be intelligent/But for all that, it’s a full-time job.”Īt 28, Louis is tall, statuesque, with sharp, angular features. “When you arrived, it wasn’t like that.”Ī cameraman and a sound operator closed in on Louis as Caillat positioned him. “Now you have Amiens at your feet,” Caillat said. Louis was in the midst of a preliminary shoot for a documentary with the working title “Édouard Louis, or the Transformation,” and the filmmaker, François Caillat, had rented the apartment for its views. On one wall hung a painting that bore the owner’s name, which somewhat stereotypically depicted four African masks suspended in a cloud of hieroglyphs across from it stood a display case containing regional glassware and a number of vintage die-cast cars. The apartment belonged to someone called Noppe, who must have been an amateur artist and collector with a nostalgic idea of globe-trotting. He said hello warmly before resuming his position in front of a large window, which looked onto a boulevard that cut through town and then vanished into green fields. Édouard Louis opened the door to the apartment at the top of the Tour Perret, the only skyscraper in the northern French city of Amiens. Van Hove is currently represented on Broadway with the new production of West Side Story, now in previews at the Broadway Theatre.
Ann's Warehouse, and The End of Eddy, which was presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave festival. The adaptation of Who Killed My Father follows earlier adaptations of Louis' other books, A History of Violence, which was recently presented at St. Read more about the upcoming production here.
"Édouard Louis also writes about how, as a young gay man, he was condemned as an outcast by his own workers' family." It is both a furious indictment of the political elite and a son's declaration of love," says van Hove in a statement online. "A gripping story about a father who, at the age of 50, is a physical and mental wreck because of the hard work in the industrial world of northern France.
Louis' autobiographical play Who Killed My Father investigates the legacy of capitalism and contemporary French politics, while also being an intimate tribute to his father. Who Killed My Father will debut April 1–5 at the deSingel Theatre in Antwerp, followed by an engagement at the International Theater Amsterdam May 7–17. Staged as a monologue play, the world premiere will star Dutch actor Hans Kesting. Tony winner Ivo van Hove will adapt Édouard Louis' Who Killed My Father, the French literary star's third book, for the stage in Europe this spring.
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