This bracing new
nonfiction book by the young superstar Édouard Louis is both a
searing j’accuse of the viciously entrenched French class system
and a wrenchingly tender love letter to his father. Who Killed My
Father rips into France’s long neglect of the working class and its
overt contempt for the poor, accusing the complacent French—at the
minimum—of negligent homicide. The author goes to visit the ugly
gray town of his childhood to see his dying father, barely fifty
years old, who can hardly walk or breathe: “You belong to the
category of humans whom politics consigns to an early death.” It’s
as simple as that. But hand in hand with searing, specific
denunciations are tender passages of a love between father and son,
once damaged by shame, poverty and homophobia. Yet tenderness
reconciles them, even as the state is killing off his father. Louis
goes after the French system with bare knuckles but turns to his
long-alienated father with open arms: this passionate combination
makes Who Killed My Father a heartbreaking book.
