I did want to mention the French writer Annie Ernaux. As in the case of Patrick Modiano, my recent readings of two of her books have been in German translation – and for the same reasons: mediocre French skills and as a matter of convenience. Firstly, some months back, having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews, I took to a hand a new German translation of La Place (“Le Platz”) at my local library; having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews in mostly German media. First published in 1984 (there is a 1992 English translation: “A man’s place”), I now know it to be representative of the very special narrative form with its highly (or absolutely?) autobiographical elements that Ernaux has chosen. Perhaps “autofiction” is the correct terminology these days, though absent the “fiction” that also doesn’t seem quite right.
La Place is a memorial of sorts to Ernaux’s father – his struggles, disappointments and modest gains – from hard, impoverished circumstances at the beginning of the 20th century, through farm and manual labour and two wars to the relative comfort afforded by a small family and “property” – in provincial northern France; reflected upon by the adult daughter now in her twenties, wife and mother, who has returned to the stupefying closeness of her childhood home that she so eagerly fled in her father’s last days. She too has moved on in life, but further, away from the hard-earned “place” in society that her father fought for and won and defended and had pride in. This narrator, this Annie, had no pride in this “place” from where she came, but irritated by her estrangement from her parents and her roots, she speaks to us and to herself from her father’s “place”, attempting to understand the nuances and conventions that erect then maintain the barriers of class. But, as much as the subject here may well be the father, his story is very much just a building block to her own autobiographical quest; in channeling the father, Annie Ernaux is on a journey, sometimes painful, of coming back to herself.
Now in the last days I have finished reading Mémoire de fille , in German of course as “Erinnerung eines Mädchens”, and also from my wonderful locallibrary. Published in original only in 2016, (and not yet in English) it fills in gaps, things touched upon but not fully explained in her 2008 and critically acclaimed work Les Années (Ger. “Die Jahre” Eng. “The Years” both pub. 2017). Not having read that work (yet!), I can only relate from other sources that it was there that Ernaux conjures (for the first time I think) this very particular voice that also characterizes Mémoire de fille. I must say I was a few pages in before I realised that the “I” (“ich” “Je”) was absent. She takes herself out of time and place; as a third person viewer to her own biography. She objectifies herself so to speak. She hovers over this eighteen year old that she once was and is both detached and intimately involved, as irritated and sympathethic as any reader may be. She is both unforgiving and non-judgemental of this her former self. The time span is not great; Ernaux approaches a memory of a just a few weeks in the Summer of 1958 that was consequential and a brief snap shot of the immediate couple of years that followed, dissects the shame that wasn’t there until it became memory, tests the boundaries of belonging, rejection and reconciliation. This literary feat of disassociation that Annie Ernaux achieves in her writing is a triumph over the demons that haunt us all.
I didn’t mean to write so much here. I need to read some more, especially the much feted Les Années, and get closer to the writer Annie Ernaux. Coincidentally today I read a bit of a Q & A with Zadie Smith in The Guardian in which she mentions Ernaux as a favourite: “… and Annie Ernaux changed my mind about French writing. In that I got very excited about it again”– that doesn’t surprise me at all. And Wikipedia alerted me to this excellent piece in The Paris Review by Laura Elkin that seems to affirm some of the things I was thinking about, including my genre confusion, and gives me much more to think about.