Collapse review – coming to terms with a brother’s death

Fiction in translation

Review

Collapse review – coming to terms with a brother’s death

In the latest autofictional instalment of his family saga, the French writer makes sense of his sibling’s violent homophobia and short 

Charles Arrowsmith

Wed 17 Jun 2026

At 33, the French writer Édouard Louis has already seen all seven of his slim novels translated into English. In his breakout debut, The End of Eddy(2017), and again in Change (2024), he wrote about being the promising child of a poor family, the bullied gay son who became a bestselling author. Several of his other books have offered sympathetic sociological portraits of his parents: a father destroyed by physical labour, a victim of French healthcare and housing subsidy cutbacks, and a mother who, after raising numerous children in poverty, fled first Louis’s father and then, in Monique Escapes, published earlier this year, his abusive successor. Now, in Collapse, translated by novelist Tash Aw, Louis describes his eldest brother’s death, at 38, from complications relating to alcoholism.

Annie Ernaux & Edouard Louis / Writing as a Political Act

Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux & Edouard Louis: Writing as a Political Act

In a twist of scheduling fate, the books of two French authors who have made their social backgrounds the main inspiration for their writing are being published almost simultaneously in the United States. Do What They Say or Else is Annie Ernaux’s second novel, while A Woman’s Combats and Transformations is a book by Edouard Louis about his mother.

Annie Ernaux & Edouard Louis /  L’écriture comme acte politique

Sophie Joubert
October 6, 2022

One grew up in a small town in Normandy; the other comes from a village in the Somme, in Northern France. Both are from working-class backgrounds – her parents were greengrocers and café managers; his father was a factory worker and his mother was a homemaker. Born 52 years apart, in 1940 for her and 1992 for him, almost two generations lie between them. Yet many subjects and concerns connect Annie Ernaux and Edouard Louis, and the French see him as a direct descendent of the author of Happening and The Years. On several occasions, Edouard Louis has actually spoken of how much she influenced his writing, such as in a 2014 interview with weekly magazine Télérama: “Her books are so powerful because they offer a new image of what crafting a book really means. I have tried to use this question as a starting point in all my writing.” In 2013, Annie Ernaux took part in L’insoumission en héritage, a collective work directed by Edouard Louis paying tribute to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who theorized the distinction and reproduction of social hierarchies.