{"id":861,"date":"2019-09-26T14:44:10","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T14:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost:8888\/wordpress_test\/?p=861"},"modified":"2022-02-15T08:38:55","modified_gmt":"2022-02-15T07:38:55","slug":"annie-ernaux-her-art-of-autobiography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/?p=861","title":{"rendered":"Annie Ernaux & an art of autobiography"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I did want to mention the French writer Annie Ernaux<\/a>. As in the case of Patrick Modiano,<\/a> my recent readings of two of her books have been in German translation \u2013 and for the same reasons: mediocre French skills and as a matter of convenience.\u00a0\u00a0Firstly, some months back, having recently come to my attention through some very interesting reviews, I took to a hand a new German translation of\u00a0La Place<\/em>\u00a0(\u201cLe Platz\u201d) 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\u00a0translation: \u201cA man\u2019s place\u201d),\u00a0\u00a0I now know it to be representative of the very special narrative form with its highly\u00a0\u00a0(or absolutely?) autobiographical elements that Ernaux has chosen. Perhaps \u201cautofiction\u201d is the correct terminology these days, though absent the \u201cfiction\u201d that also doesn\u2019t seem quite right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

La Place<\/em> is a memorial of sorts to Ernaux\u2019s father \u2013 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 \u201cplace\u201d 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\u2019s “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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now in the last days I have finished reading\u00a0M\u00e9moire de fille<\/em>\u00a0, in German of course as \u201cErinnerung eines M\u00e4dchens\u201d, 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\u00a0Les Ann\u00e9es<\/em>\u00a0(Ger. \u201cDie Jahre\u201d Eng. \u201cThe Years\u201d both\u00a0\u00a0pub. 2017).\u00a0\u00a0Not 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\u00a0M\u00e9moire de fille<\/em>. 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.\u00a0\u00a0She 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.\u00a0\u00a0The 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t mean to write so much here. I need to read some more, especially the much feted\u00a0\u00a0Les Ann\u00e9es<\/em>, and get closer to the writer Annie Ernaux.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Coincidentally today I read a bit of a Q & A with Zadie Smith<\/a> in The Guardian<\/em> in which she mentions Ernaux as a favourite: “…\u00a0and\u00a0Annie Ernaux<\/a>\u00a0changed my mind about French writing. In that I got very excited about it again”<\/em>\u2013 that doesn\u2019t surprise me at all. And Wikipedia<\/em> alerted me to this excellent piece <\/a>in The Paris Review<\/em> by Laura Elkin that seems to affirm some of the things I was thinking about<\/em>, including my genre confusion, and gives me much more to think about<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 and for the same reasons: mediocre French skills and as a matter of convenience.\u00a0\u00a0Firstly, some months back, having recently come to my attention through … Continue reading “Annie Ernaux & an art of autobiography”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,23],"tags":[30,34,110,139],"class_list":["post-861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-writers-2","tag-annie-ernaux","tag-autofiction","tag-patrick-modiano","tag-zadie-smith"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=861"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12516,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/861\/revisions\/12516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stolb01web.ddns.net\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}