The Swedish Academy awards the 82-year-old writer ‘for the courage and clinical acuity with which she exposes the roots, alienations and collective limitations of personal memory’. Ernaux, author of the years which became a bestseller in the Netherlands in 2020, is regarded as the driving force behind the ‘confession literature’.
In La femme gelée (The frozen woman, 1981) Annie Ernaux describes an event that is characteristic of her life and of her later oeuvre. The teacher at school asks all the girls in the class what they want to be when they grow up. Annie is getting good grades and wants to be a teacher, she’s ready to give her answer. When it’s her turn, the missus says: And you, Annie, grocer, sure, just like your mother. And her turn is over.
Now she has been awarded the greatest literary recognition possible to a living writer: the Nobel Prize in Literature. It’s a shame the school teacher didn’t get to experience it.
Ernaux’s parents are laborers who have worked their way up to small business owners, with a café-cum-grocery shop in Yvetot, a small village in Normandy. She is the first in the family to go to the lyceum in Amiens, where she lives during the week with girls from the well-to-do middle class. She then studies in Rouen and Bordeaux, where she obtains her teaching qualification. She continued to teach until her retirement.
Humiliation
In 1974 she makes her debut with les armoires vides, a book about her childhood in Yvetot and the death of her parents. She also describes her first encounter with humiliation: at school when she gradually realizes that she is different from the girls in her class, with fathers who are notaries or opticians. Social mobility (in French the word ‘transclasse’ is popular with people like Annie Ernaux), together with the inequality between men and women, has always remained the main theme in her work.
With her fourth novel la place (The place, 1984) who is awarded the Prix Renaudot, she breaks through in France and abroad. During a broadcast of the book program apostrophes from Bernard Pivot, she unmovedly accepts compliments on her book of grey, bespectacled dinosaurs.
la place is a novel about her father, a gentle, hard-working man, a pioneer in fact, who was in the kitchen peeling potatoes when Annie came home from school because his wife was helping customers in the store. In this novel she has also found the boned style that is so characteristic of her oeuvre. It is expressly not a novel, she states in her book. She opts for a ‘flat writing style’, without embellishments, which should approach reality as closely as possible.
Stomach in your stomach
Her most famous book L’evenement (The incident, 2004), about the clandestine abortion she had (and almost killed her) was made into a film last year and is unfortunately topical again. It’s a thin book of less than a hundred pages, but the story feels like a firm punch in the stomach. Ernaux describes as precisely as possible what she remembers.
In several interviews she has said that the hardest thing for her is not writing, but going back in memory. To dig up the memories and to bring to mind the spaces, the colours, the smells and the feeling of that time as precisely as possible and then convert them into words. Those memories are often painful or embarrassing.
In the same way, she has worked, on and off, for decades on her magnum opus, Les années (The years, 2020). On the basis of her own life, her own memories, she wrote a book about time itself. The Proustian theme of the search for a time that has passed is made tangible here by writing about small things such as expressions, fashion trends, current affairs (May ’68, the Yugoslavia war) and novelties (from instant tomato soup and toothpaste to television). In this way she records what would otherwise be forgotten.When the English translation came out almost ten years later and was acclaimed everywhere, Ernaux, who was mainly portrayed in right-wing media as ‘that teacher from the province’, finally received recognition in the French media.
Literary Godmother
The influence Annie Ernaux has had on literature cannot be underestimated. She is called a literary godmother who opened the door for female writers. She has also been the driving force behind the wave of ‘confessional literature’ with which we have been flooded since the 1990s (of women and men) and which unfortunately almost never equals the quality of Ernaux’s work. Edouard Louis (1981) is an epigone who succeeds in this in his own way: his style is completely different (he also started writing much younger – Ernaux was 44 when she made her debut) but his theme is the same.
Later in life, Annie Ernaux also started to speak out more politically. She openly supported the ‘gilets jaunes’ and is a fierce opponent of President Emmanuel Macron. She is very happy with the #MeToo movement and in a radio interview a few years ago called it ‘the revolution I didn’t know I would see’. And in 2021, two months after her 81st birthday, she said ‘on n’est qu’au début’, ‘we are only at the beginning’.
In the Netherlands, the work of Annie Ernaux is published by the Arbeiderspers. Rokus Hofstede has been her permanent translator since 2017. The translation of . will be published next spring Le jeune homme, about an episode in Ernaux’s life she hadn’t written about before, her relationship with a man thirty years her junior.