A Man's Place: Annie Ernaux

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Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Ernaux understands that writing about her parents is a form of betrayal. That she writes about their struggle to understand the middle-class literary world into which she has moved makes that betrayal all the more painful.Ernaux’s bare-boned, fragmented prose style is often harsh on her subject matter. She observes her parents’ hard work and dedication to support their family with sympathetic snobbishness. Her father mispronounced the name of her school teachers, “as if the normal pronunciation implied that he was intimate with the closed world that these words evoked, a liberty he was not prepared to take”. Revisiting painful periods is hardly new territory for writers, but Ernaux distills a particular power from the exercise.’ The few outbursts Ernaux permits her teenage self are invariably to do with language: “How do you expect me to speak properly if you keep on making mistakes?” Language was Ernaux’s father’s embarrassment, but it’s Ernaux’s, too. A book cannot capture everything – it can only do its best. Slowly and with difficulty, Ernaux’s fiction sets out to tell the story of her father against this matter-of-fact adage.

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A lesser writer would turn these experiences into misery memoirs, but Ernaux does not ask for our pity – or our admiration. It’s clear from the start that she doesn’t much care whether we like her or not, because she has no interest in herself as an individual entity. She is an emblematic daughter of emblematic French parents, part of an inevitable historical process, which includes breaking away. Her interest is in examining the breakage …Ernaux is the betrayer and her father the betrayed: this is the narrative undertow that makes A Man's Place so lacerating.’ Her parents ran a grocery shop in rural Normandy and steadily grew into a state of material comfort: “They only really longed for things for the sake of it, because in actual fact they didn’t know what was beautiful or what people were expected to admire.” She expresses these reasons for her parents’ ignorance plainly, as though trying not to pass judgement, but she doesn’t excuse them with fondness either. Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth Ernaux’s father grew up in a poor farming family in Normandy and the book begins with his death, which came exactly two months after Ernaux passed her exams for a teaching certificate. The proximity of these two events makes her reflect on the gulf that had widened between Ernaux and her father as she grew up. As she progressed through school, attended university and entered the world of the highly educated, he, hardened by a life of physical labour, looked on her achievements with suspicion, if a quiet admiration too.On 6 October 2022, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This review of her memoir “A Man’s Place” was first published in November 2020. My father died exactly two months later, to the day. He was sixty-seven years old and he and my mother had been running a grocery store and café in a quiet area of Y— (Seine-Maritime), not far from the train station. He had intended to retire the following year. Quite often, and just for a moment, I can’t recollect which came first: that windy April in Lyon when I stood waiting at the Croix-Rousse bus stop, or that stifling month of June, the month of his death. No-one writes about family relationships with the nuance, both emotional and analytical, that Ernaux does, and such a reflective, self-critical perspective is even more precious. Her exploration of language in their household is sharp …It might initially be read as a cold portrait, but the emotions and passionate thought rage through the taut writing. Likened to Simone de Beauvoir for her astute chronicling of a generation, Ernaux’s prose is intimate and unforgettable.’