Publisher's Weekly Review
In this moving autobiographical novel, Louis (The End of Eddy) lightly fictionalizes his own rape and attempted murder in brutal detail. Late on Christmas Eve in Paris, Édouard picks up Reda, a son of a Berber immigrant, on the street and takes him back to his apartment. After the two have sex, Édouard's accurate accusation of theft enrages Reda, who strangles him with a scarf and rapes him at gunpoint. The novel takes the form of a lengthy monologue by Édouard's sister, Clara, recounting the event to her husband after Édouard returns to the stifling unnamed northern French village of his childhood in an attempt to cope with his trauma. In the midst of Clara's tale, Édouard interjects additions, highlighting the pressure from his friends to report the attack to the police and his contradictory urges to talk about it and remain silent. Official systems fail to help: the police are dismissively racist and casually homophobic and doctors are cold and robotic. The unresolved conclusion, with no sense that justice has been served, heightens the horror. Louis's visceral story captures the overwhelming emotional impact and complicated shame of surviving sexual assault. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A sobering tale of crime and the exhausting search for justice in its aftermath.Following on his none-too-cheerful roman clef The End of Eddy (2017), Louis again blends fact and fiction to report a crime: On Christmas Eve a few years ago, following a chance encounter, he was raped and nearly murdered in an episode that the police dossier blandly calls an "attempted homicide." His first impulse after the act is to clean his apartment obsessively, especially anything his attacker might have touched. "I couldn't stop," he writes. "I was possessed by an almost manic energy. I thought: Better crazy than dead." As if rejoining Camus, Louis circles again and again to the scene and facts of the assault, and with all his predecessor's matter-of-factness. In a particularly telling reverie, Louis imagines approaching a stranger in a supermarket and telling that person the story, which "would be so ugly he'd have no choice but to stand there and listen till the end." In essence, that is the whole point of this lapel-grabbing narrative; it is slender but altogether powerful, unsparing in detail and not without sympathy for the people who are caught up in it, the reader included. Even the police, who are none too helpful throughout, catch a break; when they snicker at his story, it is mostly out of shock, though after a time, with their endless questioning, the cops all blend together: "I no longer saw the bodies of men and women, only repetitions that had taken on the bodies of women and men." No such lack of specificity for the attacker, who, Louis is sure, is bound to strike again, all the more reason for Louis to keep a box cutter in his pocket at all times "in case [he] was hiding and waiting."An intensely suspenseful psychological portraitand with many more questions than answers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
French author Louis burst onto the literary scene in 2014 with his debut novel, The End of Eddy, an autobiographical work that captures the struggle of both working-class life in France and the author's own sexual awakening. Here, in his second novel, the author pens an auto-biographical work about a traumatic sexual assault he experienced in 2012. The structure encloses the narrative of rape within time shifts between present observation and past memory. Moving back and forth in time as the narrator attempts simultaneously to conjure and vanquish the images of that day, the language flows like stream of consciousness and oscillates among fear, shame, and frenetic anxiety. From the clinical and cold medical examination to the racially insensitive police report, our protagonist is ensnared in dominant societal expectations and culturally situated roles of victimhood. A brief sojourn into his abuser's head, rife with anger and temporary bouts of sympathy, ultimately form the journey of his consciousness to distance itself from his own body. VERDICT A parable of redemption and hope written in beautiful and painful prose. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/18.]-Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
