Splendid words of love and sorrow at the HeartBreak Hotel

Who killed my father? (More Books, 2019) is The third autobiographical novel by the young French writer Édouard Louis (Hallencourt, 1992). A trilogy that began with Farewell to Eddy Bellegueule –a great editorial success with which he became known–, published in Catalan by Més Llibres in 2015, in which he spoke about bullying, homophobia and the injustice he suffered for being gay, and which continues to be History of violence (Más Libros, 2018), where he portrayed the rape and attempted murder he suffered on Christmas 2012. Poverty, domestic and institutional violence, the marginalization of those who are different, and the lack of social justice are manifested in the three installments in various ways.

Louis left home and went to the University of Paris, fleeing the confrontation with a sexist and xenophobic father who ignored and humiliated him for being homosexual. Following in the footsteps of the philosopher and historian Didier Eribon—author of the magnificent essay Return to Reims, To whom Louis had dedicated his first novel, Louis returns home following his father's death in an attempt to rebuild emotional bridges with his father; trying to understand him, discovering that he loved him, and realizing that his body was "destroyed by work and by a certain masculine ideology." The beauty, depth, and also bitterness of the text lie in the confrontation between humiliating and derogatory acts and others of pure paternal love that, in the end, illustrate the emotional fragility of a man compelled by a single thought. The performance concludes with an explicit denunciation of the economic and social system that imposes an exclusive model of behavior and thought. For Louis, his father was killed by Jacques Chirac, François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Emmanuel Macron.

A sensational Dafnis Balduz has made the intimate discourse his own, penetrating the protagonist's feelings with a sense of commitment and overwhelming naturalness, under the very precise direction of Pau Roca, perhaps a little too embellished. In any case, a highly recommended proposal for the intimate Heartbreak Hotel, despite the chimerical wish in the father's final words: "A revolution is necessary."