Change (2024) by Édouard Louis

 Book Review

Change (2024)

by  Édouard Louis

   The Édouard Louis universe continues to grow apace with Change, his latest work of auto-fiction, this one focusing directly on his education and reinvention into a nascent litterateur.   Louis is, at this point, an international sensation, with his books getting a contemporaneous translation out of French and into a galaxy of languages- something that took French Nobel Prize winning author of auto-fiction Annie Ernaux years to accomplish.   Louis is known for this upbringing in small-town northern France, the French equivalent of growing up in a small town in the rural south, surrounded by racism, bigotry and poverty.  As he has written many times before, all he wanted to do was escape, if only to build an international literary career by going back again and again to the circumstances of his upbringing. 

  Louis chronicles said escape, with the familiar wreckage of lost friends and spoiled relationships, sacrificed in pursuit of a goal he at times seems to hardly understand.  It's called ambition, though Louis has that "only in France" type that is defined by academic success. 

  The New York Times kinda trashed it, but how can you blame an author for giving his audience what they want?  Like he's supposed to turn around and write a six hundred book of historical fiction?  Let the man live.