best of 2017 ( )

This is a moving story about growing up gay in a small town in northern France. What struck me particularly is how easily the events described could have taken place in the north of England, or probably in any economically disadvantaged region in an industrialised country. I feel like this is autofiction, in the sense that it claims to be fiction, but I think it's basically a memoir. The first person narrator, Eddy, endures relentless homophobia, loneliness and poverty. However, the subject matter is lifted from pure misery and anger by the Eddy's charming presence. He is philosophical, humorous and playful. There is a sense that he's not just trying to tell the story of his life, but to understand it and connect it to something larger than himself.

The prose is lively and charming. There's a sense that the narrator is struggling to find a way the best way to tell this story and is not embarrassed about bringing the reader on that journey. I, for one, am very glad to have been invited along. ( )

I read this mostly after reading and watching a lot of his interviews and finding myself gravitating to how honest he was and how he was able to describe the violence of being working-class and the invisibility that is deliberately enforced on them. So when I read this, I honestly did not read it as "a novel" since I knew it was based so much on his own life and gave up trying to make my head think of it as so.

The book is a spare and brutal telling of growing up in a poor village in northern france, and also about the masculinity that he struggled with, to live up to the socially acceptable version of masculinity that was so virile perhaps because the men there felt so disempowered and angry with their life, and the violence and punishment when you did not live up to this standard was so harsh. When he later entered into more bourgeois spaces, he notes how the men were more "feminine" and gentle.

"I do not know if the boys from the hallway would have referred to their own behaviour as violent. The men in the village never used that word; it wasn't one that ever crossed their lips. For a man violence was something natural, self-evident."

What struck me most was the violence that was recounted, not simply as a series of events, but as experiences felt on the body, that even in re-telling cannot ever be truly described. In fact, the body's experience of poverty, violence, homophobia and the rigid masculinity enforced on it is persistently felt throughout the book. His re-telling of what his cousin Sylvain's life was like, the domestic violence faced by women, his own violent bullying by two homophobic boys, his father's destroyed back due to work in the factory. He connected these threads together: that the violence they produced in that village was also in part due to the violence they were being subjected to, as people sacrificed to the social order.

And then there's the persistent theme of self-policing and self-consciousness. If you grow up working-class or poor, when you enter into the middle-class or bourgeois spaces, the experience of realising that so much of your body is behaving in ways that feel wrong is such an intense, private, even humiliating feeling. It's so humbling in a way that makes you even want to turn back even as you dream of running away. There were moments of this throughout the book, most starkly for me (perhaps because it's near the end) when he throws the jacket his family saved up for because it is no longer fashionable in the middle school he went to.

I thought the final chapter felt rushed which is such a shame, but for a first book, it is really quite brilliant. Here are the first lines, that say so much already:

"From my childhood I have no happy memories. I don't mean to say that I never, in all 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." ( )

Raw and unflinching, interesting to read this kind of writing from a working class and non-urban voice. The early sexual encounters are an amazing, if disturbing, read. ( )

Crude account of growing up queer in working class France of the 1990s, written without much perspective by a very young author.

Like a French + gay "Angela's Ashes" without the Celtic humor. I didn't "buy it." ( )