Édouard Louis

I actually finished this book last year, but as with some books that I love so much, I hold off reviewing them because I feel like I can't review it perfectly enough to do it justice. Some books that have made me feel this way are Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider, George Bataille's Eroticism, and this book right here--Edouard Louis's Who Killed My Father.

It's a short book you can finish in a few hours, but so much time & pain has been distilled for these few hours of reading. So much violence show more has been faced, so much life drained, so much pain felt in so many individual bodies. This book relays the reality of political violence especially through the life & body of his father, whose back has been ruined from work in the factory. Political reality is often described in abstract or on collective terms. People are often reduced to objects of study & consideration to be debated with intellectual distance, the frame of understanding politics is often so dehumanizing, & this book I feel is such a fierce, fiery punch to that dehumanization.

When trying to answer the question of why are people poor, why did this demographic suffer more from illness, why did this community disproportionately die, there can be many political & sociological explanations. But in the book's frame, where we look at an individual life, The question of "Who Killed My Father" is answered with this paragraph that lists the names of politicians:

"Macron, Hollande, Valls, El Khomri, Hirsch, Sarkozy, Bertrand, Chirac. The history of your suffering bears these names. Your life story is the history of one person after another beating you down. The history of your body is the history of these names, one after another, destroying you. The history of your body stands as an accusation against political history”

The reality of political decisions made so swiftly, and often made with a level of self-interest by politicians, have such dire immediate and long-lasting consequences on so many individual lives. In the book, Edouard wrote how one simple political decision that doesn't affect others can mean life or death for the poor.

Today, in a pandemic, I thought I should share this book with you. As the world slips ever more into crisis, we see how decisions made so quickly push people ever more into food and shelter insecurity, lose their only source of income, & stay imprisoned in abusive homes. As surveillance & policing ramps up because that's how the state dominantly responds to crisis, we see foreign workers barred for ever working in Singapore if they are caught breaking social distancing rules. We see more & more citizens turned into potential criminals overnight as a bill passes into law. We see migrant workers, already so vulnerable, get disproportionately infected with the virus. In the eyes of the political system, are we human?

In the book, Edouard mentions repeatedly the notion of history as a force that obliterates individual life in its narrative. “Where is history? The history they taught at school was not your own. We were learning world history, and you were left out." / "“What we call history is nothing but the story of the same emotions, the same joys, reproduced across bodies and time”. It reminded me of John Berger saying "Every revolutionary protest is also a protest against people being the objects of history.".

At the end of the book, his father says "what we need is a revolution". We are not merely objects of history. Our vulnerable compatriots are not simply objects of history, & some so vulnerable that they will not even be historicised. My friends, we need a revolution. show less

There are many people who are quick to criticise Édouard Louis for merely repeating the events of his life across several novels, but that is what poverty is - the unbreakable cycle of a curse, as once described by Louis in Combats et métamorphoses d'une femme. In Change, the scars of poverty repeat itself long after Louis' supposed break from Hallencourt. Only his class is marked, he had a "classed" childhood. In one particularly violent moment, Louis' friend, Elena, teaches him to eat show more like a gentleman and not a "peasant." Maybe this was out of the goodness of her heart, but Louis lays bare the shame that such a condenscending gesture inflicts in a young boy who has not yet learnt the cruelty in such differences. Louis would spend most of his life running away from this shame.

What is most harrowing about Change, however, is the relentless performance required of Louis to assimilate into the upper echelons of Parisan society - at one point, he even spends many painful and agonizing months fixing his broken and yellowed teeth. He dedicates years and sleepless nights to reading up on literature, philosophy and culture when others seamlessly inherit such knowledge from their upbringing. This is the humiliating price he has to pay to escape the fate of his family members - his father broke his back from factory work and is permanently disabled, his brother was an alcoholic who died at 38, the list goes on. In the face of a truncated life, Louis chooses to leave his village.

But still, the guilt of "making it" when his family is still imprisoned by an oppressive system beyond their control is palpable; this indescribable sadness permeates everything Louis does. Oftentimes, Louis concedes that he had been arrogant, insensitive and opportunistic in the bid for success, an elusive achievement that he has come to question in recent years for its moral trappings and false promises. This novel is not the first time that Louis has written about his mother, and the ongoing confession that she must have been hurt by his actions is imbued with deep regret, and perhaps, the wish that he had the clarity of foresight.

This is the beauty of Louis' writing - you feel his deep rage at the state of France, but also his overwhelming tenderness for his parents. There's a graceful understanding that their imperfections, while inexcusable, have been cruelly determined even before they were born. This careful balance is what makes all of Louis' novels so life-affirming in their existence. That he even "made it" at all feels sour and tinged with bittersweetness, but for now, there is language for the feelings that we cannot name. show less

If endlessly relitigating the circumstances of your upbringing were illegal, Louis would be in jail for life.

I have, up until this point, enjoyed Louis' autofiction. A History Of Violence is fantastic and raw and full of empathy. This isn't. There's a sinister quality to Louis' interpersonal relationships which I couldn't help but take issue with here. Naturally as he's hyper-self-aware, I'm sure it's all intentional but there is an accusation to be levied at him that he is in fact (as the show more semi-anonymous social media posts he references state) a bit of a social parasite. He seems to subsist on handouts from the wealthy and connected within whose lives he ingratiates himself.

Louis here comes across as someone deeply unhappy with himself; even now as he writes almost two decades divorced from those circumstances. The book feels borderline spiteful and dismissive, painting a picture of an individual so desperate to clamber out of the pits of social deprivation that he would quite happily suck the blood out of another's neck if he thought it might get him into the Sorbonne.

Je sais pas. Je ne le connais pas comme ça. Mais je suis sûr qu'on ne le voudrait pas comme un ami. show less

The End of Eddy, the first autobiographical novel by Édouard Louis published in 2014, was an account of the extreme poverty and homophobic violence he experienced growing up in a village in northern France. Change, which starts where Eddy ended, might well have been called the revenge of Eddy.

It’s about ambition as a desire to become someone else, success as revenge on those who abused and excluded him; as revenge on fate itself. Young Eddy is sent to a Lycée in Amiens specialising in show more the performing arts after a teacher in his village school discovers that he has a gift for acting. Hardly surprising given that he had been acting all his short life in a desperate attempt to fit in. He continues to display his theatrical skills after meeting a middle-class fellow student called Elena and her cultured family, consciously aping her manners, habits and interests. He begins to systematically change every aspect of himself: his accent, the way he walks, how he laughs, the clothes he wears, the food he eats and even how he holds cutlery, his hairline, his crooked teeth, and his name. He finances his reinvention by working as a rent boy. He determines to become famous to show his tormentors that he is better than them (famous for what is less important to him).

Change is a dream of revenge which comes true, but the victory is pyrrhic. Louis triumphs only at the cost of eradicating himself and his history. He moves on in the world but neglects to take his past with him. When he leaves Amiens for Paris, having been accepted as a student at the École Normale Supérieure, Elena accuses him of having used her and her family to his advantage. He is attacked by friends on social media as egotistical, manipulative and a social climber. His education estranges him from his family. Constantly moving on, in flight from his past as much as in pursuit of the future, he leaves behind him a trail of broken relationships. He finds himself in a sort of no man’s land; self-exiled from his own class and not fully accepted or at ease in the bourgeois world he has entered. His first book becomes a bestseller but the revenge of success turns out to be not so sweet or liberating as he imagined.

I’m making Change sound like an old-fashioned morality tale, beware of what you wish for and all that, and perhaps it is. Eddy effectively turns himself into a persona rather than a person. A deep ambivalence about the concept of social mobility in class societies runs through this novel. A hard-won scepticism which provides a healthy corrective to all those facile ‘change your life’ books.

Louis’ prose is spare, intimate, and as clear as a windowpane. His superb narrative ability draws the reader in and makes the book hard to put down (admittedly I read him in translation, I expect he is even better in the original French). He has a rare gift for extrapolating sociological and political argument from precise observation of experience. He writes about his emotions and his desire for revenge, his sometimes appallingly insensitive behaviour towards his mother, and his opportunism, with a frankness that is often quite chilling. I read Change quickly, swept up by the power and urgency of the story, but will certainly read it again. Its deceptively simple style contains immense complexity of thought about how we live now. Rather like Orwell, another master of self-transformation whose work blurred the boundaries of fact and fiction, Louis is a politically committed writer yet highly nuanced, even conflicted, and that makes reading him a fascinating but slippery business.

The great B.S. Johnson, who also obsessively told his life story and working-class family history in the form of novels, once said that novelists should write ‘as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter’. Édouard Louis is certainly doing that. He is a writer of profound moral seriousness whose apparently solipsistic narratives illuminate the whole of society. show less