I didn’t want that responsibility of bringing this vision of a great writer into another language. It perhaps helps that we are joined on the Zoom by his close friend and translator of A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, the novelist Tash Aw.Īw took some cajoling to get on board: “I’ve known Édouard for many years and I never wanted to be the translator. Yes, Louis does speak in wonderfully ornate paragraphs rather than sentences, but in the flesh (or, on the video screen) he is disarming, affable and funny even when talking about, say, the shackles of the patriarchy. Not just the usual inferiority of the monoglot English speaker when encountering a continental intellectual but, given his activist reputation, there was the tingle of dread that he might be a po-faced philosophe whanging on ad nauseum about Derrida. I had a bit of trepidation interviewing Louis. I wanted this book to not be bourgeois, to be inescapable: I wanted people to see the violence that my mother went through, the violence that society was imposing on her and how much it destroyed her.” “Books can be nice and bourgeois you are reading on the sofa with your cup of tea, you can stop, go to bed, reopen the book. I didn’t want that responsibility of bringing this vision of a great writer into another language I’ve known Édouard for many years and I never wanted to be the translator. The fact that the whole story is told in one sitting, that you close the doors in a theatre and the audience cannot really escape it. I was kind of fascinated by the shape of tragedy: the shortness of it, the directness of it, the violence of it. Louis says that structure was linked to translation: “I was translating into French a few of Anne Carson’s tragedies: her version of ‘Antigone’ and one of her own on Marilyn Monroe called ‘Norma Jean Baker of Troy’. Although it is hardly a straightforward memoir it is non-linear, slipping between anecdotes, monologues, philosophical musings and family history over a brisk 120 pages. She was always blaming me for not being masculine enough or for being too strange and I thought, ‘What happened between this mother I knew and the one in this picture? What was the starting point? How would I find the kind of archaeology of the destruction of this happiness on her face? How did she go from being such a dreamy, smiley person to being that violent?’ So I kind of started to dig in and try to understand how much masculine violence, poverty, parenthood and motherhood contributed to undoing this happiness.”Ī Woman’s Battles and Transformations is a bit of a departure for Louis in that it is more obviously shaded toward pure autobiography-for example, he uses his mother’s real name, Monique Bellegueule, rather than a pseudonym as in his previous titles. Louis says: “In my first book, and in my childhood, my mother was aggressive, violent, dark. The genesis of the book was stumbling upon a photograph Louis had never seen before of his mother, in which she is young, smiling and happy. She is something of an oppressive, angry figure in his previous work and here, as in Who Killed My Father, Louis attempts, if not a complete rapprochement, to somehow have a greater understanding of his mother’s motives. Now comes something of a coda to the first three books, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, which looks at his mother’s experiences. I kind of started to dig in and try to understand how much masculine violence, poverty, parenthood and motherhood contributed to undoing this happiness That last part is an important component of Louis’ work-he mines his life for his art, but that personal is very political and his and his family’s lives are inextricably entwined with the structural forces of capitalism which work to keep the poor poorer. Who Killed My Father, written as a long letter to his father, touches on his parent’s violent tendencies, their heartbreakingly difficult relationship and the economic conditions that left his father a physical and emotional wreck. History of Violence saw Louis dealing with the trauma of being raped, his subsequent PTSD and the difficulty of being caught in the so-called justice system after he reported the assault to the police. Louis’ follow-ups had a similar impact, also skirting the line between memoir and fiction. The book was a sensation on publication: critically fêted, a monster hit at la caisse that became a culture-war touchpaper, sparking debates around social inequality, sexuality and toxic masculinity. His autobiographical début novel, The End of Eddy, charted his struggles growing up gay in a family living below the poverty line in working-class northern France. For the past seven years Édouard Louis has been the biggest thing in French literature, after bursting on the scene aged just 22.
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