Exteriors

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Of course, there’s something bleak about a new town already vandalized, but it also signifies verve and humanity. In this memoire Ernaux sets out to relate her observations during her daily outings on the train, in the supermarket or the mall like a series of snapshots. I find myself turning the corner, hoping to run into someone I spoke to a few years ago, just to have the chance to strike up a conversation that will bring us back to those days.

One can either relate them in detail, exposing their stark, immediate nature, outside of any narrative form, or else save them for future reference, ‘making use’ of them by incorporating them into an ensemble (a novel, for instance). This is a completely different mode of writing than anything else I’ve read by her and is additive to her autofictive depiction across her oeuvre, perhaps essential. What mesmerizes here, as elsewhere in Ernaux’s oeuvre, is the interplay between the solipsistic intensity of the material and its documentary, disinterested, almost egoless presentation.Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person’s lived environment. Exteriors" also gives us a look into Ernaux's writing process, and the way literature so completely engages her mind — something I found both enviable and amusing.

Again blurring the line between memoir and fiction, Ernaux continues the story of her family in journal form. In other words, the feelings and thoughts inspired by places and objects are distinct from their cultural content…a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall. Reminiscent of the poet Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without its Flow, a study of how grief mangles chronology, Simple Passion is a riveting investigation, in a less tragic key, into what happens to one’s experience of time in the throes of romantic obsession.

I need to become involved in a lengthy, structured process (unaffected by chance events and meetings). In some of the books she tries to be almost ruthlessly unemotional, focusing on cold descriptions of events and relationships. but there were some moments that were hit and miss, and, although i think that the cultural references are important to/add to the book, not being able to fully understand them sort of isolates the non-parisian reader (which may have perfectly been intentional, who's to say?

Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place. it builds up into this really cool portrait of paris in the late 80s, as well as giving you an idea of how ernaux views the world in an even more raw and unfiltered way than her actual prose does.

Both laws rely on the same misconception of reality, the only reference being oneself: in the first case, we imagine everyone else has lived our life, while in the second, we long to recapture our past identity through people who are frozen in time, whose features are the same as when we last saw them. So I think this is the last of the several brief memoirs or autofictions I have read and all in 2022 so far (!

Most of the pieces arise from rail trips between Paris and her home in Cergy-Pontoise, ""a new town 40 kilometers outside of Paris. Strangely enough, there exists another truth, the exact opposite: when we go back to a town we left a long time ago, we imagine that the people there will still be the same, unchanged. Glimpses, scenes, and pieces of overheard dialogues from Ernaux's life as she commutes from her home on the outskirts of Paris to the capital itself, walks the city, and goes to the supermarket(s). He told me that he thought I was trying to goad him into a reaction by showing him the watch and its manufacturer, having previously known his political stance and general affiliation with the company. Without even looking, we manage to avoid one another’s bodies, barely centimetres apart in the throng.Perhaps that’s a part of the reason, but I also like to think that it just imitates reality and the way we think the closest. The train crawls along, as the autumn conditions in Toronto necessitate caution when navigating the open-space areas of the subway track.