Read the excerpt from the novel by the French writer Édouard Louis: It’s 12.33 am and I start to write in this dark and silent room. Outside through the open window I hear voices i

Read the excerpt from the novel by the French writer Édouard Louis:

It’s 12.33 am and I start to write in this dark and silent room. Outside through the open window I hear voices in the night and police sirens in the distance.

I’m 26 years and a few months old; most people would say that my life is ahead of me, that nothing has started yet, but for a long time now I’ve been living with the feeling that I’ve lived too much; I imagine that’s why the need to write is so deep, to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it, or maybe, conversely, the past is so anchored in me now that I’m forced to talk about it, at every moment, on every occasion, maybe it has won out, and by believing I’m getting rid of it I’m only bolstering its existence and its ascendency over my life, maybe I’m trapped – I don’t know.

When I was 21 it was already too late, I’d already lived too much – I’d known misery, poverty in my childhood, my mother asking me time and again to go and knock on the neighbours’ or my aunt’s door with an imploring voice so they’d give us a packet of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce because she had no more money and she knew that a child would be more easily pitied than an adult.

I’d known violence, my cousin who died in prison at 30, my older brother who was sick with alcoholism even as a teenager, who woke up drunk most mornings because his body was so steeped in alcohol, my mother who denied it with all her might to protect her son who swore to us every time he drank that it was the last time, that after that he’d never drink again. The fights in the village cafe, the obsessive racism of rural, isolated communities, underlying every sentence, or even every word.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/28/edouard-louischange- book-extract

The narrator in this passage