After QHS (High Security Prison, published in 1980 with a foreword by Michel Foucault), which denounced conditions in French jails – particularly the use and abuse of solitary confinement, in The Ecameaux Novel (originally published by Grasset, in 1984), Roger Knobelspiess introduces us to his mother, his family and the society he grew up in, amongst the urban poor in the Écameaux devlopment in an overlooked suburb of Elbeuf, in the Seine-Maritime. It is written in Knobelspiess’ inimitable hyper-sensitive, incurably rebellious style in which foul-mouthed slang melts into breathtakingly poetical passages, portraying a harsh, poverty-stricken world of under-privilege that can also sometimes be tender, funny and colorful. Describing the daily lives, dreams and failures of his 'characters', who have been crushed by poverty, the author reveals the full breadth of his human complexity in this autobiographical 'pseudo-novel'.

At a time when poverty is spoken of more and more abstractly, through the screen of numbers and statistics, Roger Knobelspiess paints a pitiless – but also funny and affectionate at times – portrait of those men and woman, young and old, who society has abandoned to their own devices. Written in a stunningly rare and powerfully singular voice that pairs invectives with dazzling poetry, Knobelspiess’s style shows us the true face of that other France.