A Woman's Battles and Transformations by Édouard Louis

A Woman’s Battles and Transformations
By Édouard Louis
Translated by Tash Aw 
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2022

Celebrated young author Édouard Louis’s 2021 booklet Combats et métamorphoses d’une femme now has an English-language translation from Farrar, Straus  and Giroux by Tash Aw. A Woman’s Battles and Transformations preserves both the original’s leaden, portentous title and, as an added bonus for the $20 asking price, every other word in this limp and boring bit of memoir is likewise leaden and portentous. And once again, the fault cannot be laid at the feet of the translator; Tash Aw has done everything human ingenuity can do to flush some life into these dead-lily pages. No, it’s the author’s original French that rolls half-upright on its afternoon couch, looks around, and blandly waits to be applauded for at least seeming to be semi-conscious. 

If you’ve ever endured the tedium of being slowly, methodically toured through the minutiae of somebody else’s family photo album, you’ll have some sense of what it’s like to read A Woman’s Battles and Transformations (horrifyingly, the book even includes blurry black-and-white family photos). The element Louis adds to that mundane experience is a kind of grim Gallic swampishness, the implication – entirely incorrect – that a universe of profundity can be squeezed out of any old madeleine. 

The consistent attempt here is to inhabit the interior experiences of our author’s mother, but Louis, bless his truant heart, doesn’t try very hard. The shorthand will be familiar to any readers of his earlier books: father as ogre, mother as saint, author as martyr. And likewise familiar is the lazy, shorthand-jotted prose:

Unrelenting misfortune: against the backdrop of misery and tension with my father, she became pregnant. No one understood how it happened: she’d had an IUD inserted a few months earlier, to avoid further pregnancies. The doctors at the hospital told her that she was expecting not one child but two – twins. Shock. 

Shock indeed, but decidedly low-voltage, as are the grand insights Louis offers about the deeper connections between mother and son. “With both started our lives as History’s losers – she was the woman, I the dissident, monstrous child,” Louis writes, going on, as always, to cap the pompous with the absurd: “But as in the mathematical equation, a perfectly symmetrical inversion, the losers of the world we shared became the winners, and the winners the losers.” 

What do passages like that mean? Who knows? The important passages in the book don’t have anything to do with a woman’s battles and transformations – they’re all about Eddy, called out at every childhood event:

The little one with the blond hair, what’s your name?

EDDY!

Eddy what? 

EDDY BELLEGUELLE!

Haha! Prettyface? Nice one.

That’s what he said – he thought I was joking.

I’m going to call you Fly Thighs. 

In the end, for all its surface-level attention to a downtrodden woman married to a brutish man, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations will prompt readers to ask the same question they’ve asked after each of this author’s books: will Édouard Louis ever write a book that isn’t about the sad fact that some people teased him when he was fifteen? Surely the French have a phrase for “Don’t hold your breath”?

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.