Annie Ernaux & Edouard Louis: Writing as a Political Act
In a twist of scheduling fate, the books of two French authors who have made their social backgrounds the main inspiration for their writing are being published almost simultaneously in the United States. Do What They Say or Else is Annie Ernaux’s second novel, while A Woman’s Combats and Transformations is a book by Edouard Louis about his mother.
One grew up in a small town in Normandy; the other comes from a village in the Somme, in Northern France. Both are from working-class backgrounds – her parents were greengrocers and café managers; his father was a factory worker and his mother was a homemaker. Born 52 years apart, in 1940 for her and 1992 for him, almost two generations lie between them. Yet many subjects and concerns connect Annie Ernaux and Edouard Louis, and the French see him as a direct descendent of the author of Happening and The Years. On several occasions, Edouard Louis has actually spoken of how much she influenced his writing, such as in a 2014 interview with weekly magazine Télérama: “Her books are so powerful because they offer a new image of what crafting a book really means. I have tried to use this question as a starting point in all my writing.” In 2013, Annie Ernaux took part in L’insoumission en héritage, a collective work directed by Edouard Louis paying tribute to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who theorized the distinction and reproduction of social hierarchies.
In the course of twenty books, Annie Ernaux has devoted herself to the excavation of her own life.
By Madeleine Schwartz April 13, 2020
A young woman has her first sexual experience. She is pleased to be desired by someone. She does not feel humiliated. But, later, she is mocked, tormented by others who believe that she has debased herself. Those whom she thought of as her friends now treat her like nothing. She feels shame. Is the shame hers? Or is it a reflection of what is expected of her?
"What mesmerises here, as elsewhere in Ernaux's oeuvre, is the interplay between the solipsistic intensity of the material and its documentary, disinterested, almost egoless presentation."
"Annie Ernaux is the sort of writer who practices vivisection. With words, she lays open a life -- not only her own but others' as well: mother, father, lover, friend. Keen language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse."
- Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review (28/11/1999)
Born into a working-class Catholic family in Normandy in 1940, Annie Ernaux is one of the most popular French writers in the United States, where her books have been translated since 2003. Originally destined to become an elementary school teacher, she ended up working as a literature professor before devoting herself entirely to writing after retirement. This subtle chronicler explores reality in her autobiographical works, novels, and stories such as The Years, a finalist of the prestigious International Booker Prize. A Girl’s Story, which recounts a secret hidden for fifty years, was recently translated into English and lauded by the U.S. press.
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE 2022 Translated by Tanya Leslie
A Woman's Story is Annie Ernaux's "deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality” (Kirkus Reviews). Upon her mother's death from Alzheimers, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.” She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was. She writes, "I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world."
‘We are made of words’: the radically intimate writing of Annie Ernaux
She offers us her own life, her own pain, without shame – and gives voice to the silences of women. For this the Nobel prizewinner deserves to be celebrated
Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett
Friday 7 October 2022
‘These things happened to me so that I might recount them,” Annie Ernaux writes in Happening, her slim retelling of the clandestine abortion she had in the 1960s, when the procedure was still illegal in France. “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing. In other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.”
Annie Ernaux: the 2022 Nobel literature laureate’s greatest works
Catherine Taylor 6 October 2022
Writer and critic Catherine Taylor explains how the French writer became the ‘great chronicler to a generation’
F
or once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature – only the 17th woman out 119 laureates in the award’s history.
This slim volume was my first experience of the French author Annie Ernaux, a writer I’ve been intending to read for quite some time. This particular book has been namechecked in so many essays and articles I’ve read in the last few weeks it felt like the perfect opportunity to begin my reading relationship with Ernaux. I enjoyed I Remain in Darkness so much I have already ordered several more of her books. The writing is razor sharp, analytical and incredibly well-observed. Though it’s often painfully focused on the banal, repetitive and unpleasant aspects of watching a loved one’s journey with Dementia the language is so beautiful and each word so perfectly placed it still reads a little like prose poetry.
The Nobel committee chair praised Annie Ernaux for her ability to describe shame, humiliation and jealousy
Annie Ernaux: 'Uncompromising' French author wins Nobel Literature Prize
Helen Bushby and Ian Youngs October 6, 2022
French writer Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize in Literature, for what the panel said was an "uncompromising" 50-year body of work exploring "a life marked by great disparities regarding gender, language and class".
Book Review : I remain in Darkness by Annie Ernaux
FEBRUARY 16, 2020 CHEMBARATHI
In the past few years I had a difficult time in accepting the fact that parents are growing old. I was always seeing them as these fierce, middle aged people who scrutinized my actions, admonished for the choices I made and tried to fit me into the box of a dutiful daughter. But now it seems that the tables have turned.I have reached the fierce, middle age stage and my parents are shrinking into the childhood that is old age. In one moment I can hear myself scolding them for not keeping up with the doctor’s appointment and the next moment I am this young girl who got scolded off by her mother because she didn’t take the medicine on time. As I look back, I will trade anything to go back to the latter stage.
Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux: The exquisite pain of passion
A deceptively simple story of an affair with a married man is shatteringly insightful
Sat, Apr 18, 2020, 06:00 Lucy Sweeney-Byrne
Simple Passion opens with Annie Ernaux’s account of watching porn for the first time:
“No doubt, one gets used to such a sight; the first time is shattering. Centuries and centuries, hundreds of generations have gone by, and it is only now one can see this … It occurred to me that writing should also aim for that.”
Published 10 March 2021 French paperback with flaps, 56 pages
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, she attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married man where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, Ernaux seeks the truth behind an existence lived, for a time, entirely for someone else.
From Karl Ove Knausgård to Marguerite Duras, the French author Nina Bouraoui celebrates the writers whose stories are told without invention
Nina Bouraoui Wed 16 September 2020
A
n autofiction is a work of truth; the author is not hiding behind an invented character, she is that character. The character’s spiritual and philosophical quest is the author’s own; the “I” of the narrative is the author, recreating the world according to his or her own experience.
She delivers the truth, without altering or falsifying the facts, as if putting together a police report. The power of autofiction comes from its universality. When she tells her own story, the writer describes an expanded world, one that unites us all.
The writer’s own story is the human story, with the same structure and complexity. Autofiction doesn’t arise from the urge to invent, to create a fictional other and tell a tale according to the rules of a particular form. It’s more a way of experiencing the Other as a being similar to oneself: “when I speak of myself, I’m speaking of you.” It may not be the absolute truth the author is telling, but it is her truth as she lived and experienced it.
Towards the end of the 1990s I was asked by the French writer Christine Angot to write an autobiographical novel for her series of autofictions with the general title of Sujet(Subject). I had just started therapy and the analysis spilled over quite naturally into my writing.
I was driven by a genuine craving to write about my origins, my identity, my dual nationality, my sexuality. I felt that in getting to the heart of my own truth, I was also touching on what seemed to be a universal truth. After that I wrote three auto-fictional novels, bringing together my childhood, adolescence and young adulthood.
In 2008, I came back to the more traditional novel, inventing characters and stories that weren’t part of my own experience. I wrote All Men Want to Know 10 years later, perhaps as a response to the times. On the one hand gay rights had become more widely recognised and defended, at least here in the west, but at the same time, we were witnessing a rise in verbal aggressions towards minorities in France, as well as a surge in violent homophobic assaults.
I can lay claim to having a triple status: I’m a woman, I’m of mixed race and I’m gay. With the rise of the extreme right, I felt it was important to tell my parents’ story: a French woman marrying an Algerian man, my mother’s arrival in Algiers after 1962, a time when the French were all leaving Algeria; our life there, full of beauty, poetry and sometimes, danger; the discovery of my sexuality. It takes courage to step outside of the norm and become the person you are. I wanted to affirm once and for all that one’s sexuality, one’s identity has a story of its own, that it doesn’t arise from nowhere, that it is not something one chooses.
I feel affection and admiration for all writers of autofiction and for the books they write. It takes a certain kind of courage to deliver up the truth about oneself. I see it as a kind of political act, too: in declaring who you are, you’re also saying something about other people and about the world we inhabit.
Guibert is the father of autofiction, the master of finding that perfect balance of truth and beauty. In this book, he tells the story of his illness, Aids, in the late 1980s. He tells of how life with the virus became an existential adventure, how it affected a generation, how it stole his friends and lovers, and how writing was for him a bulwark against death and destruction. It’s the story of an era, a turning point – when Aids transformed our relationship with desire and sexuality forever.
Zorn could be Guibert’s brother. A somewhat mysterious figure, who only wrote this one novel, Zorn writes of his strict, repressive upbringing and denounces the hypocrisy of bourgeois Zurich. He writes in clinical, icy terms of his cancer, in which, to his great surprise, he found a kind of salvation. This is a book about the prison of the family and the veiled violence within it. A masterpiece.
Essential reading for anyone who wants to understand this great writer. In Practicalities, Duras tells of her childhood in Indochina, her relationship with alcohol, her experience of the second world war, of religion, love and the solitude in which books are born. She writes about the places that mattered to her – her house outside Paris, her apartment on the Rue Saint-Benoît. This is Duras as seen by Marguerite, an intimate and major work.
Norwegian writer Knausgård has constructed an autofictional edifice. The master of detail, he writes not only about life as it is being lived, but also about the roots of that life: childhood, adolescence, the death of his tyrannical father. Knausgård’s work, considered by some to be sensationalistic, is the ultimate in provocative, brutally honest autobiographical writing.
This short work tells the story of a woman’s great love. Ernaux’s unadorned prose lays bare the madness of love and the workings of the flesh: expectation, physical tension, surrender – written, as always, with consummate skill. Ernaux never tired of writing of passion and lost love, of the female body and its vertiginous relationship to the male.
With great courage, Angot writes of how an incestuous father ruptured a soul’s equilibrium to the core, fracturing its relationship to love, to the world (in this instance, a conflicted relationship with a woman) and to other people. A work unequalled in its power to give strength and comfort to all abused children.
In 1957, Sagan was involved in a car accident and spent several months in hospital recovering from her injuries. During that time, she kept a journal in which she reflected on pain, writing and morphine. This previously unpublished journal throws light on the work of Sagan, who almost died at the height of her fame and who found herself caught in the infernal cycle of drug dependence.
The story of a generation (the 1980s again) and the key to all of Ellis’s work. This is Ellis from the inside: the origins of Less Than Zero, the success of American Psycho, an overview of our time, Ellis predicting the end of the novel, perhaps, and revealing his desire to tell it all the way he sees it.
A love story about a young reader (Yann Andréa Steiner) and his passionate admiration for a woman who writes: Marguerite Duras. This is their story, set in Paris and Trouville, told in words and silence. A window on the world of Duras: a world of books, films, plays – and alcohol. Yann Andréa was Duras’s young gaycompanion, her first reader and her great love.
10. Consent by Vanessa Springora translated by Natasha Lehrer The autobiographical account of a woman, who at the age of 14 was allegedly groomed by a man in his 50s, the writer Gabriel Matzneff. It tells the story of an adult’s hold over a young girl barely out of childhood. This extraordinary book could not have appeared without the #MeToo movement and the power it gave to women to speak out.