“Am I doomed always to hope for another life?”

As Goodreads’ resident Édouard Louis fan club president, you know that I couldn’t wait to dive into Louis’ latest autofictional extrapolation! I’ve been waiting (at times, impatiently) for this book to be translated—it’s one of, if not his most, inward-looking inspections, drawing to memory the methods he used to forget his past and reinvent himself, at times losing himself in the process. Desperate to transcend out of his rural hometown and away from his family, Louis dreams of being ‘saved’ – of making a chance encounter with someone who will transform him, remake him, and it’s through this transformation that I think Louis believes he’ll discover his own freedom.

The first encounter is Elena: an unlikely friend he makes while studying in Amiens. And let me tell you, their story has all the makings of the most gut-wrenching coming-of-age film you’ve ever seen. They’re inseparable as they go to the cinema talk, discuss literature, have countless dinners with Elena’s parents, cultivate dreams of living a Bohemian life together. Louis assimilates to Elena’s polished lifestyle by way of imitation, forging attempts to become like her as much as possible. This friendship, like the relationships he makes years later in Paris, is a countdown, a fuse. The dream, sooner or later, will apart, marked by wild hope that maybe—just maybe—a good thing can last forever.

When Louis arrives in Paris, he’s struck between two extremes: both the freedom of the city and the impostor syndrome it creates. He’s now on the other side of the country, trying to find a new version of himself through the same methods of imitation as with Elena, soon realising that Amiens and Paris are entirely different ecosystems. He ricochets from expensive dinners paid for by wealthy men to penny-pinching meals of stovetop pasta, a singular meal to last the entire day. And it’s here that he questions if he can ever outrun the world that made him.

“Are there people for whom taking advantage of what’s given to them is legitimate, and others for whom it’s a scandal, an expropriation?”

One of the interrogations at the center of Change is that of betrayal and manipulation. Throughout the novel, Louis questions his relationships not only with Elena and her family, but also the men he met in Paris who introduced him to, as Emily St. John Mandel puts it in The Glass Hotel, “the world of money.” Where is the dividing line that separates a genuine and caring relationship from one of manipulation, from expropriation? Is all reinvention a form of expropriation?

Further, Louis questions if reinvention is actually possible, or if it’s an insatiable uphill battle. Louis writes: “Am I doomed always to hope for another life?” It brings to mind the myth of Erysichthon, who was punished with a wrath of hunger: the more he ate, the hungrier he became, and so nothing was ever enough. And so is ascension possible? We can’t outrun our memories or the things that made us, but a country can also seem like a reinvention. How many times have I thought about a fresh start in Australia, in Ireland, in a country I’ve seen but never traveled to? I think one of the things that Louis is arguing here is that a new place is not an answer. It is the beginning of more work. And that yes, you can remake yourself, but you will lose things in the process. Maybe no world will ever be enough, but maybe we’ll find something good along the way. Maybe we’ll be saved.

“In the process of change those around us are as important as what we’ll become.”

I loved Change – there’s an illustrious maturity to the writing, a careful introspection come to be expected of Louis’ work, but which strikes especially strongly here. This novel relies, or rather hopes, that the author’s story is already known. Louis mentions the homophobia outlined in The End of Eddy, the assault in History of Violence, the portrait of his father that he makes in Who killed my father, but he doesn’t tell any of these stories again. For the newcomer, it makes the most sense to read through the rest of Louis’ books first and then come back.

I’ll end with a quote that Édouard Louis pulls from Gilles Deleuze: “When you meet someone it’s a landscape, and not a person, you fall in love with; a landscape with its own scenery, its own geography, its own features.”

J'achèterai ce livre dès qu'il sera imprimé. Merci. J'espère que vous avez trouvé votre maison.