Édouard Louis writes captivatingly and vividly about the road he has traveled ★★★★★

Just a few months after Combats et metamorphoses d’une femme Édouard Louis (1992) already came up with the following: Changer: method. Something he had certainly been working on for some time, given its size and quality. The book will be published in Dutch translation at the end of this month.

The shortest summary of it would be: the making of Édouard Louis† His debut Down with Eddy Bellegueule from 2014 ends when he starts a new life in Amiens, the city where he is the first of his family to go to the lyceum at the age of 14. In Changer: method he writes about the road he has traveled, from the first steps in freedom, outside the village (they never arrived in the city 40 kilometers away, because of ‘the foreigners’), to the message that the Seuil publisher wants to publish his first book . At that time, Édouard Louis lives in Paris and has not had any contact with his parents or siblings for years.

The book is not a chronological summary: style and structure are just as interesting as the outrageous experiences he describes in it. He addresses his father and his school friend Elena, another part is written in the I-form. He reflects on what he writes in asides and in ‘made up interviews in front of the mirror’.

A tight straitjacket

Back to the beginning. When Édouard Louis is admitted to the lyceum, he soon realizes that that is not enough. He’s out of tune. Not just because of his clothes or his rural accent, it goes deeper: from the way he moves to the way he smiles and what he eats. Also when it comes to general knowledge, he is far behind other children. He has to change. How? First by imitating Elena. She becomes his best friend and has had an upbringing that was pretty much the opposite of his.

Four years later, he meets Didier Eribon, university teacher, philosopher, writer. For Édouard, Amiens, his friends, Elena and his university studies turn history into a tight straitjacket – just like the village it was before – from which he must escape. Fleeing, to Paris, just like Didier, and aiming for the highest, an admission to the École Normale Supérieure, that’s all that matters.

With ‘the inexhaustible energy of humiliated children’ he throws himself on this almost impregnable horde. That energy is inspiring and impressive, but sometimes you also feel sorry for Louis for what he does to himself, often just to make a good impression on the rich men he hangs out with. The decadence of the Parisian upper-class environment in which he moved for a while, contrasts sharply with the deep poverty in which he grew up. From doing homework at the television and then handing it in with sauce and grease stains on it, to a night at a banker in his huge apartment: ‘Be careful, don’t pour wine on the sofa, it’s polar bear’.

In conversation with Ken Loach

The contempt of the 1 percent for the rest of the world, who in Changer: method subtly named is also the subject of a dialogue that Louis had with film director Ken Loach (1936). The text of the conversation, which can be seen on YouTube, is now also available in Dutch translation.

It’s hard not to watch and listen to Édouard Louis without realizing that even his smile is the product of hours of training. His success has cost him not only pain, effort and money (an orthodontist, surgery), but also family and friends. He has completely reinvented himself twice. When he realized that he also did not belong in aristocratic circles, he started writing. Lucky for us.