Cover of Collapse

Collapse

The blazing new book from the author of The End of Eddy
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Collapse

By: Édouard Louis, Tash Aw — Translator
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Summary

I often hated my brother, but I have to understand his life.

The unflinching story of Édouard Louis’s brother’s violent life and death.

Édouard’s brother spends much of his life dreaming. He lives in a poor, working-class world, where he imagines that he will become one of the finest butchers in France, that he will travel, that he will make his fortune, that he will restore cathedrals, that he will earn his father’s love.

But his reality allows none of this. There is no way to escape, no one who can show him how, and everything about him – his drinking, his violence, his behaviour with women and with others – condemns him.

At thirty-eight he is found dead on the floor of his small studio apartment. This book is the story of his collapse.

Translated by TASH AW

‘One of the most important, politically vital and morally bracing writers of his generation’ GUARDIAN

‘Bracing, pulverising... burns with white-hot truth’ COLIN WALSH

‘Louis has never been tenderer, more sophisticated, or more fully on form’ NAOISE DOLAN

© Édouard Louis 2024 (P) Penguin Audio 2027
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Reviews

Collapse takes the form of a metaphysical inquest into the brother’s decline… Read in tandem with Monique Escapes, Louis’s latest reveals itself as the dark half of an equation that also has a more hopeful side
The book also reconfigures autobiographical writing... Collapse treats language not as a stable medium of representation, but as a form of pressure, often political, applied to lived experience. The result is neither elegy nor revenge narrative, but a sustained test of what language can and cannot hold together, and of what attention, under sufficient intensity, might finally release
A powerful translation… Collapse is dark, bitter, ragged and a triumph
Tash Aw’s translation underlines Louis’s pitiless lucidity: this is a very different read from the breezier, more sentimental accounts that British working-class intellectuals have tended to give of such journeys... The tragic situation that the novel explores is material and intractable: it is a tragedy of sociology
What Édouard Louis has to say is so urgent that I buy all his books as soon as they're out in French. I am so glad that English-speakers can now access his latest departure through Tash Aw's new translation. COLLAPSE unites Louis's trademark sociological sharpness with a new and quite terrifying psychological depth, giving us a life at once overdetermined and touched by something darker, more elusive. He has never been tenderer, more sophisticated, or more fully on form. (Naoise Dolan)
Édouard Louis surely belongs to that vital group of writers, amongst the likes of Cusk, Rankine and Ernaux, who have revitalised and reinvented their own form in a relentless pursuit of the truth (Andrew McMillan)
Full of writing that is both rigorously controlled and profoundly shaken, Collapse is a bracing, pulverising book. It burns with white-hot truth, the sort that illuminates even as it incinerates (Colin Walsh)
Spare, raw - and quite unforgettably moving. Édouard Louis is someone who makes writing matter (Neil Bartlett)
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