![]() ![]() ÉL: It was our publisher’s idea, and I said it would be a dream to have Tash as the translator because of our mutual understanding. SQ: How did you decide to work on this translation together? If I didn’t have people like Tash, or Didier Eribon in Paris, I would surrender. When you say things that people don’t want to hear, when you show things that people don’t want to see, you expose yourself to extremely violent reactions. I think that friendship is a kind of avant-garde laboratory for creation - and there is no avant-garde without friendship. Basically we have conversations about literature and politics almost every day. Our creation and friendship have become so intertwined. I only have this kind of close friendship with Tash and maybe two other people. Then we have days of what we call “coordination”: we discuss what could be reinforced, what could be erased, what should stay. And when I finish my manuscript, Tash will read it. SQ: When did you begin sharing your work with each other?ĮL: When Tash is finishing his manuscript, I will read it. To have someone like Tash say, Yes I witnessed that, helped confirm that I wasn’t going crazy. When I published The End of Eddy - because I was talking about the violence in the village, because I was talking about homophobia, because I was talking about racism - everyone was calling me a liar. It felt like I was reentering the village in a way. But then it was very interesting to meet someone with the eyes of an outsider - a gay Chinese man, a writer, a novelist. When he started talking about it, I thought he was like a stalker. It’s not like the south of France where lots of people go to vacation in even the small villages. The village is so remote - there is no train station, it’s in the north. ![]() ÉL: The thing is, it’s completely improbable. TA: Then I read it, The End of Eddy, and was completely hooked. At that point I had lived in the village for fourteen years, because my partner - now husband - is from the region and inherited a small house.Ī few months prior to the festival, our neighbor had come running into the house, Have you heard of this disgusting book that’s been published in Paris? It contains all sorts of lies. I could see that he was really, really doubtful, until I gave him more details. We met at the door and I told him that I knew his village. I had just finished my talk and Édouard was going into the same room to do his talk. TA: We first met at a literary festival in Norway. I was seeing a friendship unfold in real time rather than a friendship framed for presentation. But I also realized this conversation was far more exciting than what I had imagined. Even in discussing friendship, Louis and Aw remained tethered to ideas. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that we never lingered long in emotion or memory. How did it feel to breach that new territory? The two writers have exchanged work with each other for years, but this was their first time collaborating as an author-translator pair. How do you bring yourself to look so closely at your past, your family? I also wanted to plumb Louis and Aw’s relationship, because I often find friendship between men inscrutable. #EDOUARD LOUIS HOW TO#I was not trying to pry secrets out of Louis or Aw, but I longed for answers about how to live a better, more courageous life. I confess, though, that I did not intuit that Louis’s preference to approach the personal with a sociological lens would extend to interviews, so I arrived at the apartment with a list of mostly personal-leaning questions. Now, in A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, he excavates the life of his mother in order to talk about masculine domination. In successive books he would use his father ( Who Killed My Father) and again his own life ( A History of Violence) as his starting points. In his breakout debut, The End of Eddy, he depicted in unsparing detail the homophobia and class violence that made his life unbearable as an effeminate child in his working-class village in the north of France. Louis is an autobiographical writer who uses his own body and the bodies of his family to elucidate the forces that circumscribe society. We planned to focus on Louis’s latest memoir, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations, which Aw translated from the French, but with the play still fresh in my mind, I was thinking about the book in the context of his larger body of work. I had already met Édouard Louis and Tash Aw the previous evening - after the opening night of the stage adaptation of Who Killed My Father, a group gathered in the garden at Louis’s rental apartment - but today it was just the three of us. I brought flowers, anxious to make a good impression. ![]()
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