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A Novel
by Edouard Louis
Book Reviewed by:An autobiographical novel from Édouard Louis, hailed as one of the most important voices of his generation—about social class, transformation, and the perils of leaving the past behind.
One question took center stage in my life, it focused all of my thoughts and occupied every moment when I was alone with myself: how could I get this revenge, by what means? I tried everything.
Édouard Louis longs for a life beyond the poverty, discrimination, and violence in his working-class hometown—so he sets out for school in Amiens, and, later, university in Paris. He sheds the provincial "Eddy" for an elegant new name, determined to eradicate every aspect of his past. He reads incessantly; he dines with aristocrats; he spends nights with millionaires and drug-dealers alike. Everything he does is motivated by a single obsession: to become someone else. At once harrowing and profound, Change is not just a personal odyssey, a story of dreams and of "the beautiful violence of being torn away," but a vividly rendered portrait of a society divided by class, power, and inequality.
Change, Louis's latest novel, picks up where The End of Eddy leaves off and finishes the story, detailing the difficult, intensely intentional process by which Louis's autofictional alter ego transforms himself from Eddy to Édouard and attempts to do what his younger self thought he'd already done—leave his old world behind. The Eddy of Change is motivated solely by his desire to avenge his past—to show everyone who bullied him and underestimated him and trapped him that he is better than they are. Édouard the narrator sees everything he does as a definitive break, a border crossing between his past and his future. Elements of Louis's previous works that seemed to me more traditional—characters with ambiguous motivations and feelings; tension about what will happen next (even as we know how the story will end eventually); room for surprise—are missing. And yet I loved Change and its monomaniacal narrator: his rigorous honesty, his physical inability to lie to himself about what he wants or what he will accept; the way he honors his life by working hard for his future self...continued
Full Review
(1330 words)
(Reviewed by Chloe Pfeiffer).
In addition to being a novelist, Édouard Louis, author of Change, is a scholar of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Louis's scholarly work has explicitly informed his novels, which are about the violence and indignity of poverty, the racism and homophobia of his working-class childhood, and the difficult act of moving between classes.
In 1979, Bourdieu published Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), which Louis called, in conversation with Stephen Patrick Bell for the LA Review of Books, "probably the most important book about social classes since the works of Karl Marx. For sociologists all around the world, it completely flipped the script on the old analysis of what social classes are."
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If you liked Change, try these:
by Violaine Huisman
Published 2022
A gorgeous, critically acclaimed debut novel about a young woman coming of age with a dazzling yet damaged mother who lived and loved in extremes.
by Edouard Louis
Published 2018
An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.
Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom
I feel so lucky to be living and writing at the same time as Édouard Louis. Reading the urgent, unspooling prose of Change―Louis's latest account of a motley life lived so far―fills me with admiration and inspiration, as well as renewed faith in writing itself, and the value of paying persistent, pellucid attention to our relations, desires, histories, and selves.
