CHANGE, by Édouard Louis. Translated by John Lambert.
Édouard Louis (né Eddy Bellegueule) burst onto the French literary scene in 2014 at the age of 21 with “The End of Eddy,” an autobiographical novel that announced, with aplomb, his own abnegation. The immolation is even more direct in the original French — “En Finir Avec Eddy Bellegueule,” something like “finishing off Eddy,” as others rendered it.
Raised in a rural village in northern France, Eddy grew up not only miserably poor, but miserably gay and miserably bright. In direct, unsentimental prose, Louis recounted the assaults, mental and physical, of his childhood, and his ascendance above them: He changes his name (to the far more bobo Édouard Louis), his appearance, his location, his milieu and, ultimately, his class. “The End of Eddy” is a renunciation, startlingly unsparing. It became an international best seller.
In the 10 years since, he has continued publishing at a rapid clip. But Eddy hasn’t ended. His story remains the central part of Louis’s oeuvre, explored in “History of Violence” (2018), about Louis’s rape in Paris, and even more so in “Who Killed My Father” (2019), about his brutal, alcoholic father, and “A Woman’s Battles and Transformations” (2022), about his mother. These books, together with a documentary and a number of theatrical productions — one starring Louis himself — form an extended Louis universe, orbiting the semi-reformed, semi-redeemed figure of Eddy/Édouard. Now the latest, “Change,” published in France in 2021, and newly translated here, takes Eddy up again. (The title is, once again, sharper in French: “Changer: Méthode,” or, roughly, “How to Change.”)
The inescapability of the past is a classic writerly fixation, and in his relentless focus on himself as a character, Louis is no different from many other writers of autofiction — the doyenne of the form, the Nobelist Annie Ernaux, is an on-the-record fan. But for readers of “The End of Eddy,” let alone the entire Louis canon, “Change” feels stuck in a familiar rut. “Need I tell you again how it all started?” Louis wonders near the beginning of “Change.” The answer, again, is yes.
