Transformation and liberation: Édouard Louis and Erlend Loe

With his seventh novel, Collapse, Édouard Louis has now completed his celebrated family saga about his own upbringing and family.

Louis writes ruthlessly and skillfully about subjects such as class distinctions, violence, racism, gender, and political power and powerlessness, and his writing has become a point of reference and inspiration for writers across the world. Through the seven novels making up his family saga, he portrays the social structures that are the basis for the violence he experienced as a child, as well as his ambivalence towards his own family and the wider working class. However, he is most ruthless when exposing his own life and flaws.

Louis has two new novels out this year: Collapse and Monique Escapes. In Collapse, Louis explores his older brother’s decline, one he both feared and came to for safety, and who died, aged 38, after a life of alcoholism, poverty, neglect and self-inflicted violence.

In Monique Escapes, he portrays his mother’s escape from yet another destructive and violent relationship, marked by alcohol and degrading treatment. The novel depicts her struggle to find a way out when she has neither money, an education certificate nor a driver’s license.

In both novels, Louis explores how social and economic structures shapes and limits people’s possibilities to create a free life. “The most political thing I do, is portray that which is invisible,” Louis said last time he visited the House of Literature. He returned now to talk about completing his family saga, his literary ruthlessness and the way ahead. He was joined by writer colleague and critic Erlend Loe, who has followed Louis’s body of work closely.

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