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French Literature

Qui a tué mon père (Who killed my father) 

Schaubühne Berlin and Théâtre de la Ville Paris
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12 March 2024
Édouard Louis in Qui a tué mon père (photograph by Roy Van Der Vegt)

For the past decade, French writer Édouard Louis has been excavating and recuperating a childhood spent in a state of acute precarity in the Hauts-de-France. He has written both critically and empathetically about the lives of his parents and siblings, while also casting a probing eye on himself. His first novel, the autofictional En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule (The End of Eddy, trans. Michael Lucey, 2014), was published when he was only twenty-two and has enjoyed significant success in translation.

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The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, an abridged edition by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Carol Cosman, edited by Joseph S. Catalano

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May 2023, no. 453
Brian Nelson reviews 'The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857, an abridged edition' by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Carol Cosman, edited by Joseph S. Catalano,

The Family Idiot (originally published in French in three volumes in 1971–72) is a study of Gustave Flaubert (1821–80). It was published in a fine translation by Carol Cosman, in five volumes, between 1981 and 1994. The Sartre scholar Joseph S. Catalano has produced a skilful, beautifully edited abridgment of this gargantuan opus. 

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