Collapse

A Novel with the Dimensions of Ancient Tragedy

“My brother spent much of his life dreaming. He grew up in a poor, working-class environment and often imagined he would become a world-famous restorer, travel, repair cathedrals, get rich – and that his father, who had disappeared, would return and love him. None of these dreams came true.”
It all begins with a death: At the age of 38, Édouard’s older brother, a severe alcoholic, is found dead on the floor of his small studio flat. After years of avoiding any contact with his violent, homophobic, and ruthless brother, for whom he held an insurmountable aversion, the writer now sets out to investigate the causes of his brother’s collapse – to discover, above all, what he did not know about him until now.
Change (for the worse) is Édouard Louis’s darkest book. Face to face with death, sociology is no longer enough to examine an individual's fate, so he turns to psychology and intimacy. The result is a novel with the dimensions of an ancient tragedy – a story of an inevitable fall caused by a chain of family, social, and psychological ties.