The Nobel Prize for Literature was announced this week, recognising French author Annie Ernaux 'for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.'
I have several books by Ernaux sitting on my to-be-read shelf, but have not yet explored her work. I had hoped to read her work in French, but fear my abilities in that language have faded from disuse, so I may need to resort to an English translation or a bilingual tandem read.
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux was initially a teacher. She is known for writing in plain language about life from different perspectives. Many of her novels are brief and autobiographical. Ernaux has also published memoir, non-fiction, and diaries.
Let's take a look at a few of her best known works.
Passion simple (1991) / Simple Passion (trans 2003) - The story of a woman's affair with a younger, married man. Set in Paris around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This affair becomes all consuming, an adrenaline-fueled passion which burns fast and hot. She is infatuated, spending her time away from him constantly thinking about him and planning their next encounter. While her whole life revolves around this man, she doesn't really know him.
L'evenement (2000) / Happening (trans 2001) - Happening tells the story of a young woman who has a secret abortion in 1960s France, when terminations were illegal. At the time, oral contraception was also illegal, so when university student Anne becomes pregnant, she knows she is not equiped to have a child. She seeks out someone who can assist her to terminate the unwanted pregnancy.
Happening has recently been adapted into a film directed by Audrey Diwan, which won the Golden Lion at the 78th Venice International Film Festival in 2021.
Les Annees (2008) /
The Years (trans 2017) - Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize,
The Years is a personal narrative spanning six decades of the author's lifetime. Starting in the1940s as a child in war-torn and post-war Normandy, to a young adult in the 1968 student uprisings, the changing Europe of the 1980s and 1990s, and the turn of the century.
Memoire de fille (2016) / A Girl's Story (trans 2020) - This is the story of a girl's first sexual encounter and what happens afterwards. At summer camp when she is 18, a naive young woman loses her virginity to a 22 year old camp counsellor. But rather than explore the story from the girl's perspective, the author views this experience from older age, reflecting back on this moment and what it meant then and now.
While many of Ernaux's works focus on her life, she also writes about her family and their experiences. Ernaux turns her lens on her father, a grocer, in La Place (1983) / A Man's Place (trans 1992) and her mother's battle with dementia in Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit (1997) / I remain in darkness (trans 1999).
Learning about Annie Ernaux and her work once again encouraged me to reflect on the diversity of my reading and the need to include more writers in translation. I am intrigued by how Ernaux takes her own life experience and writes not as memoir but as inspiration for her fiction, blurring lines. I have
Simple Passion, Happening and
The Years, so will give Ernaux a whirl.
