What the French narrator Édouard Louis does in these pages is to show his personal life odyssey, his search for meaning, his existential impulse in order to rebel against a monotonous and unattractive destiny, where love and memory also play a leading role. , as they are part of the pillar that leads to this dramatic story.
By Martin Parra Olave
Posted on 1.9.2023
Ehe French writer Édouard Louis (Hallencourt, 1992) arrives in bookstores with a work that maintains the autobiographical character that we know of him up to now. In this last work, throughout the entire narrative, a tone of honesty floats that allows the reader to immediately connect with the story being told.
In this way, and having an eminently autobiographical character, the narrator tells us part of his life through a first-person voice that makes him feel close, entertaining and almost like a confessional:
«I am twenty-six years and a few months old, most people would say that I have my whole life ahead of me, that nothing has started yet, and yet for a long time I have lived with the impression of having lived too much; I imagine that is why the need to write is so intense, as a way of fixing the past in what is written and thus, I suppose, getting rid of it; Or it may be that, on the contrary, the past is now so anchored in me that it forces me to talk about it, at all times, on any occasion, that it has won the game and that, thinking I am getting rid of it, I am only reinforcing its existence and its control over my life; I may have fallen into the trap… I don’t know.”
run away from a destination
In his eagerness to seek his own life and differentiate himself from his parents, this boy does the impossible to generate permanent transformations in his life:
«I fled from that fate and was a salesperson in a bakery, a doorman in a building, a bookseller, a waiter, in charge of checking tickets in various theaters, a secretary, a private teacher, a prostitute, a monitor in holiday camps, a guinea pig for medical experiments. Miraculously, I studied at a school that was considered one of the most prestigious in Europe and came out with a degree in philosophy and sociology, although no one in my family had any studies. I read Plato, Kant, Derrida, Beauvoir”, he reflects on the first pages of this profound and entertaining testimony of life.
What the French narrator does is show us his personal life odyssey. It is his search for meaning, his existential impulse to rebel against a monotonous and unattractive destiny, where love and memory also play a leading role, since they are part of the pillar that drives the story.
In short, this work is a work of self-knowledge where there is some psychoanalysis, since the story serves as a permanent form of internal conversation of the narrator himself. But what is most striking is that constant feeling of dissatisfaction that sneaks between the pages of each chapter, where anxiety also overcomes any hint of stability.
Thus, and in one of the most intense moments of writing, Louis acknowledges that: “fleeing was fighting for a happiness that I have never come to feel”, where, in addition, he gives an account of the anguishing dissatisfaction that a difficult childhood meant for him but that despite everything was strange and wonderful.
For sure, Change: method It is a moving book that the reader will not be able to stop reading.
***
Martin Parra Olave He has a degree in government and public management from the University of Chile and a master’s degree in letters from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is currently studying for a doctorate in literature taught by the last House of Studies.
“Change: method”, by Édouard Louis (Salamander, 2023)
Martin Parra Olave
Outstanding image: Edward Louis.
2023-09-03 18:13:04
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