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A review by omemiserum
Change by Édouard Louis
4.0
'Or rather: I hated my childhood and I miss my childhood. Is that normal? [...] (I know that if I went back I'd hate this world, yet I miss it.)'
Reading Edouard Louis' work, ironically, has such a nostalgic quality for me now - in some ways, he's much the same even as he was before (I speak for his books alone - clearly, the personal transformation has always been profound), but with each new new piece, there's an increase in reflexivity that perhaps only time, maturity (dare I say... change?) can bring. I read my first book of his 6 years ago: I was 13. I've followed him and his writing with varying degrees of commitment and focus since - I wonder if my fixation is akin, in a much more detached way, to his with the likes of Didier Eribon as a 17 year old in Amiens. The parallels are much less acute - my upbringing much less torturous, much more middle class, acutely British, and never quite possessing the same motivation and fervour for change - but he still speaks to me now as he did then, when I was a child who was queer, othered, self-loathing and desperate to become something, desperate to escape the plagues of my upbringing and become someone new, to liberate myself through education and self-discipline. I cited two of his books in the personal statement I wrote in what I felt were, at the time, futile efforts to earn a place at the 'prestigious' university I now attend. I keep a signed letter from him, procured by an old friend at a talk in Warsaw, in the journal that is usually with me (it reads 'To Astrid, and to our hopes...' and features a drawing of a boat - I might've cried when I received it (albeit privately, later)) and it manages to be a prized possession despite the fact that I've never met the guy. This feels exposing to say - I lay no claim to this man's life, or to his pain, or to his experiences. But still, his work called to me, and maybe that's the beauty of art (at least part of it).
I'll probably never feel the same awe (and shock... and disturbance) I felt when I read 'The End of Eddy' for the first time, which is inevitable, and probably for the best. Nevertheless, this book still brought new insights - in fact, it explores the aspect which most compelled and intrigued me as a 13 year old, that being the future of his life after the events of the book. His arrival at the lycée felt like a moment of transformation back then (I know now that it was only the very beginning, and much more would change to warp him unrecognisably away from being the person that he once was), and this autofiction details his transformation from that young student to the person that wrote his debut. His changing habitus, to borrow from the Bourdieusian handbook (a clear influence), his acquiring of capital (hardly economic, save for right at the end, but social, cultural, symbolic), is violent, embodied, and forced. This embodiment has always stood out to me in his work, and I appreciated it here more than ever - to be bourgeois is not simply to be of this class, but to possess a bourgeois body, a physical entity forced to interact with the world and be treated by the world in certain ways. There's a palpable resentment, a lot of the time, for those he leaves behind. I felt frustrated by it often while reading, but increasingly little as the book progressed and his tone became increasingly more mournful, reflective, apologetic, regretful; the pain stays, always, but there's a sadness too, of disregarding what he left behind. Escaping clearly felt like an ontological necessity; Louis maybe sees it as part of his nature. I understand the 'méthode' aspect of the title deeply, and it reads like a handbook, sometimes, requiring infinite sacrifices, unimaginable temporality, and absurd quantities of reading. I wonder how he did it; the ever-increasing proximity to the French aristocracy was pretty awe-inspiring, in a mildly disturbing way. I wonder if it ever made him feel whole (almost certainly no, not truly, as the reflections in the epilogue highlight - the yearning and nostalgia come once you've escaped, but you never could've felt that way back then, and such is the agony of changing, of becoming).
As ever, I come to lack insights. But I'm always a little bit healed, and a little bit more motivated, after reading Edouard Louis. Maybe that's toxic when the change is self-destructive, unhealthy, reckless, arguably 'selfish,' or maybe such terms are arbitrary and entirely miss the point when talking about something so integral and desperate. I don't know. Everything can be criticised, sure - but we will continue to do and be, imperfectly and agonisingly, regardless.
-
(edit as of 21/05/24) I've been thinking more about this review and book recently, especially with relation to a conversation I had with my sociology supervisor, in which he aptly called Edouard Louis "only eclectically and iconoclastically a Bourdieusian" in response to something I said about his Bourdieusian influences (and how, thusly, I too have been influenced through his work towards Bourdieusianisms and Bourdieusian thinking, even prior to indoctrination with British sociological education). I think this is right, with retrospect; I don't necessarily go that heavy on the Bourdieu in my initial review, but perhaps I thought wrongly and now feel obliged to write a corrective in relation to my wrongthink. Although Louis is the prime Bourdieusian subject - working class Frenchman who entered the Grandes Ecoles and changed himself to get there - habitus, for him, is not set. He pushes against it from the beginning, agentively; he never gels with the habitus he was born into, and it is difficult to read him not as having been in constant conflict, almost since birth, with structure. Sure, he was influenced deeply, and had to change to even vaguely fit in with the crowd of the French elites (something perhaps unattainable in a full sense), but his is a tale not of stasis, but of change, that almost felt ingrained from the start. And how can identities like sexuality factor into habitus and classing processes beyond Bourdieu's types of capital? Might we extend this to gender, ethnicity, race, etc? Idk, food for thought, some of which probably predicated upon static misreadings of Bourdieu. But nevertheless - interesting.
Reading Edouard Louis' work, ironically, has such a nostalgic quality for me now - in some ways, he's much the same even as he was before (I speak for his books alone - clearly, the personal transformation has always been profound), but with each new new piece, there's an increase in reflexivity that perhaps only time, maturity (dare I say... change?) can bring. I read my first book of his 6 years ago: I was 13. I've followed him and his writing with varying degrees of commitment and focus since - I wonder if my fixation is akin, in a much more detached way, to his with the likes of Didier Eribon as a 17 year old in Amiens. The parallels are much less acute - my upbringing much less torturous, much more middle class, acutely British, and never quite possessing the same motivation and fervour for change - but he still speaks to me now as he did then, when I was a child who was queer, othered, self-loathing and desperate to become something, desperate to escape the plagues of my upbringing and become someone new, to liberate myself through education and self-discipline. I cited two of his books in the personal statement I wrote in what I felt were, at the time, futile efforts to earn a place at the 'prestigious' university I now attend. I keep a signed letter from him, procured by an old friend at a talk in Warsaw, in the journal that is usually with me (it reads 'To Astrid, and to our hopes...' and features a drawing of a boat - I might've cried when I received it (albeit privately, later)) and it manages to be a prized possession despite the fact that I've never met the guy. This feels exposing to say - I lay no claim to this man's life, or to his pain, or to his experiences. But still, his work called to me, and maybe that's the beauty of art (at least part of it).
I'll probably never feel the same awe (and shock... and disturbance) I felt when I read 'The End of Eddy' for the first time, which is inevitable, and probably for the best. Nevertheless, this book still brought new insights - in fact, it explores the aspect which most compelled and intrigued me as a 13 year old, that being the future of his life after the events of the book. His arrival at the lycée felt like a moment of transformation back then (I know now that it was only the very beginning, and much more would change to warp him unrecognisably away from being the person that he once was), and this autofiction details his transformation from that young student to the person that wrote his debut. His changing habitus, to borrow from the Bourdieusian handbook (a clear influence), his acquiring of capital (hardly economic, save for right at the end, but social, cultural, symbolic), is violent, embodied, and forced. This embodiment has always stood out to me in his work, and I appreciated it here more than ever - to be bourgeois is not simply to be of this class, but to possess a bourgeois body, a physical entity forced to interact with the world and be treated by the world in certain ways. There's a palpable resentment, a lot of the time, for those he leaves behind. I felt frustrated by it often while reading, but increasingly little as the book progressed and his tone became increasingly more mournful, reflective, apologetic, regretful; the pain stays, always, but there's a sadness too, of disregarding what he left behind. Escaping clearly felt like an ontological necessity; Louis maybe sees it as part of his nature. I understand the 'méthode' aspect of the title deeply, and it reads like a handbook, sometimes, requiring infinite sacrifices, unimaginable temporality, and absurd quantities of reading. I wonder how he did it; the ever-increasing proximity to the French aristocracy was pretty awe-inspiring, in a mildly disturbing way. I wonder if it ever made him feel whole (almost certainly no, not truly, as the reflections in the epilogue highlight - the yearning and nostalgia come once you've escaped, but you never could've felt that way back then, and such is the agony of changing, of becoming).
As ever, I come to lack insights. But I'm always a little bit healed, and a little bit more motivated, after reading Edouard Louis. Maybe that's toxic when the change is self-destructive, unhealthy, reckless, arguably 'selfish,' or maybe such terms are arbitrary and entirely miss the point when talking about something so integral and desperate. I don't know. Everything can be criticised, sure - but we will continue to do and be, imperfectly and agonisingly, regardless.
-
(edit as of 21/05/24) I've been thinking more about this review and book recently, especially with relation to a conversation I had with my sociology supervisor, in which he aptly called Edouard Louis "only eclectically and iconoclastically a Bourdieusian" in response to something I said about his Bourdieusian influences (and how, thusly, I too have been influenced through his work towards Bourdieusianisms and Bourdieusian thinking, even prior to indoctrination with British sociological education). I think this is right, with retrospect; I don't necessarily go that heavy on the Bourdieu in my initial review, but perhaps I thought wrongly and now feel obliged to write a corrective in relation to my wrongthink. Although Louis is the prime Bourdieusian subject - working class Frenchman who entered the Grandes Ecoles and changed himself to get there - habitus, for him, is not set. He pushes against it from the beginning, agentively; he never gels with the habitus he was born into, and it is difficult to read him not as having been in constant conflict, almost since birth, with structure. Sure, he was influenced deeply, and had to change to even vaguely fit in with the crowd of the French elites (something perhaps unattainable in a full sense), but his is a tale not of stasis, but of change, that almost felt ingrained from the start. And how can identities like sexuality factor into habitus and classing processes beyond Bourdieu's types of capital? Might we extend this to gender, ethnicity, race, etc? Idk, food for thought, some of which probably predicated upon static misreadings of Bourdieu. But nevertheless - interesting.