I read this autobiographical novel when it first came out in French in 2016 and I’m delighted to say that thanks to translator Lorin Stein it has retained its complexity, its startling physicality and its moral subtlety in English.
The book speaks with many voices. Édouard, after being raped and threatened at gunpoint on Christmas Eve, takes refuge with his sister Clara. Unbeknown to her, he overhears from the next room as she tells her husband the whole story of the night’s violence. The husband seldom comments, but Édouard takes mental exception to what she is saying, adds detail and silently corrects the narrative. Clara is obviously sympathetic to her traumatised brother but, speaking to her husband, she simultaneously reproaches Édouard for taking excessive risks and dealing with the situation ineptly. Some of her resentment of his success as a writer and the dark picture he has drawn of their family in his similarly autobiographical debut novel, The End of Eddy, leaks through as well.
The story is simple. After revelling with his two best friends, a pair of lovers, Édouard is hurrying home to read the coveted books he has received as Christmas presents. In the deserted streets he notices an attractive man who is cruising him heavily. Torn between sexual desire and the solitary pleasure of reading, he makes up excuses at first, but finally surrenders to sex.
The man, Reda, is an Algerian (not an Arab, Louis is careful to point out, but a Kabyle) with as tireless a sex drive as Édouard, but as dawn approaches and Édouard showers, Reda steals his phone and iPad. Soon after Édouard notices the missing possessions, Reda turns violent and rapes him at gunpoint.
Urged on by his friends, Édouard reports Reda to the police. The wheels of “justice” begin to grind and Édouard is unable to stop them. As we know from the brilliant The End of Eddy, Édouard has criminal elements in his own impoverished family; he feels both frightened by and sympathetic towards Reda, with a deep ambivalence towards the man who nearly murdered him.
Louis’s greatest strength as a writer is that he feels things so passionately, sometimes to the point of obsession, but that he also has a philosophical turn of mind that explores, rather than neutralises, his feelings. For instance, when he retreats to the countryside after his encounter with violence, he thinks: “Ever since I faced my own death with Reda, I’ve been afraid of not believing in anything any more, and of replacing the absurdities of my own life with other absurdities: countryside, rest, simplicity, solitude, reading, water, streams – or even: livestock, barnyards, wood fires – because that’s all it would be, replacing one set of absurdities with another, and I thought: Your being here with Clara means you’ve failed.”
Édouard speculates about Reda’s motives. He doesn’t want him to think he’s outraged by his pilfering; he wants to say, I’ve stolen things too, it’s no big deal. Then it occurs to him that Reda is ashamed of his homosexuality and their night of shared ecstasies.
The novel is superb at vividly recording the post-traumatic repercussions of rape. In spite of all his previous beliefs, Édouard becomes racist towards dark-skinned men. In this age of political correctness, it takes authorial courage to examine the irrational side of human reactions. Édouard succumbs to OCD: counting the seconds until someone arrives, the number of stairs to climb. The text also veers towards an exaggerated physicality; Reda has “injected fear into his body”. The narrator longs to be ugly: “The individual I had become … dressed as badly as he could, thinking, I want to look the way I feel, I want to be as repulsive as the thing that happened to me.” He goes to Turkey on holiday and is afraid of everyone: “Immediately I realised what a mistake it had been to come on this trip; I multiplied the number of days by twenty-four to get the number of hours I’d have to spend there. I multiplied the total by sixty using the calculator on my phone to figure out the number of minutes I’d have to stay. I started counting.” Everything becomes an extension of his rapist:“my pillow was Reda, the pitch darkness was Reda, the sheets were Reda”.
Most people mythologise the past and turn traumas into fables. Only rarely does someone remember all the horrid little facts of a past aggression or indignity; Louis has just that sort of painful but necessary recall. He doesn’t correct his past thoughts to agree with the present ones.
Why is this a novel rather than a memoir? The main character shares a name and all biographical details with the author. Perhaps a “novel” is more representative and less eccentric than a memoir. Or, just as Louis felt the need to screen or distribute the painful narrative by giving parts of it to his sister, to tell part of it in the third person, so the artifice of fiction was necessary to tell this most woeful of stories.
• Edmund White’s The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading is published by Bloomsbury.
History of Violence, translated by Lorin Stein, is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £10.99 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.