Édouard Louis: "The End of Eddy"

Bryce Dessner (*1976), contemporary composer and guitarist of the American indie rock band The National, was Artist in Residence at the Tonhalle Zürich in the 2023/24 season. For his composition "Aheym", a search for one's own cultural identity as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, Dessner has set the world bestseller "The End of Eddy" by the French author Édouard Louis as a literary bracket. In this haunting, docu-biographical novel, Louis tells of his childhood and youth. And of what it was like to live as an excluded among the excluded: as a homosexual boy in the precariat of the province of Normandy. Even more than the brutality of his classmates, the psychological and physical coercion that Eddy inflicts on himself in order to "normalize" his body and bend it into heterosexuality is shocking. And around him, his parents and siblings are crumbling because of their poverty, crumbling in the provincial landscape of ruins on the abysses of capital.

Edouard Louis, along with Didier Eribon and Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux, belongs to the French triumvirate of the autobiographical novel, which short-circuits the self and society in literary and sociological terms and captures it in poignant scenes with which the repressed misery burns itself into the hearts and brains of the readers.

Reading: Gian Rupf

Musicians: Lucija Krišelj, Alican Süner (violin), Héctor Cámara Ruiz (viola), Mattia Zappa (violoncello)

Introduction: Martina Mutzner

Admission: 35.-/15.-/ 25.- (members Klibühni)
approx. 80 min., without intermission

In cooperation with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, the Klibühni and the Chur City Library