Literary Twitter flooded earlier this week About the Nobel Prize in Literature. French writer Anne Erno was mentioned as a candidate – gave her 31 – 1 odds – among many others. I thought Ernaux’s win was unlikely and responded: “I’m not an expert on literary awards, but about Ernaux – I’ve followed his work for decades – I think for women who write about their lives, It’s an uphill battle to earn their respect. Should or because their work is considered “universal” in this way.”
My first encounter with Ernaux’s work was at 40 When I was in a long-term relationship with a married man, yes he let me Travel back and forth between Paris and New York. She is more than books, most of which are relatively brief descriptions drawn from her memory of life – which doesn’t immediately feel like it’s something literary, but here’s Ernaux proving us wrong again The place.
born in1940, she grew up in Ivito, Normandy, the daughter of a farm boy and a factory worker, both in 20, he has come a long way in the world to run a provincial Cafes and grocery stores. The first in her family to receive higher education, she worked as a literature teacher for many years, eventually becoming a member of CNED, the French national correspondence school. (Her two thin books about her parents’ life, Men’s Place and The story of a woman , haunted by a sense of class betrayal, that her ascent as a writer meant to her.) Marked, essays to be graded. She married, had two sons, then divorced, and eventually moved to the suburbs of modern Paris, where she still lives today, far from the French literary world.
Her prose is the opposite of purple. Its heroism lies in its modesty, as it taps into intensely personal experiences and, as they are concretely rooted in material culture, part of a collective history. This is her description in A Woman’s Tale (as the others mentioned here, lovingly translated by Tanya Leslie) , a week after her mother’s death: “I would start crying for no reason… I woke up from a deep sleep, and I remembered nothing but my mother in a dream, dead. All I did was daily chores. : Shopping, cooking, loading the washing machine. I often forget how to do things in the right order. After peeling the vegetables, I have to stop and think before I can move on to the next stage, which is washing the vegetables.” Grief over the death of a loved one Is there a more redundant but more touching description of how the gears affect life?
and finally a man’s place, She wrote, “Now I have completed the possession of the inheritance that I had to give up when I entered the educated bourgeoisie world.”
In What’s going on She recalled, 23 Years after the fact, she desperately looks for a -early students-1940 of France in the back alley of abortion. (The film based on the book and directed by Audrey Dewan won the Golden Lion in Venice last year.) She’s neither merciful nor apologetic on the subject of female desire—really shameless. My favorite Ernaux book from a long time ago, Understatement
Simple Passion , after being robbed in a tough time in life Restored my will to read mine. (Full disclosure: I’m far from home now, but years , some consider her masterpiece, on my nightstand. ) in that book she wrote about the years she spent beside her with a married foreign diplomat 42s. Time is running out, she’s waiting to have sex with him, and then it seems like nothing else matters to her – not even writing, otherwise it’s her most faithful companion, her redemption.
“What if a woman told the truth about her life? The world would split,” poet and activist Muriel Ruquesser wrote. Well, we may still be waiting for the world to fall apart, but Anne Erno has done that. It’s great that a larger audience will now be introduced to this extremely simple writer and experience her work.
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