Exteriors

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Soeur Sourire is one of the many women I have never met, and with whom I might have very little in common, but who have always been close to my heart. Be they dead or alive, real people or fictional characters, they form an invisible chain of artists, women writers, literary heroines and figures from my own childhood. I feel that they embrace my own story. These are some things I jotted down when I was reading the book. I can’t come close to capturing what I see and how I feel like Ernaux, but I find that I need to write something down. Endlessly stimulating author. Glimpses" would have been an equally worthy name, and perhaps a more truthful one as these individuals' "exteriors" often do tell us more about them, and — as the author noted above — us, than the word "exteriors" may suggest. Sexism, economic inequality and classism; Annie Ernaux observes a lot of broader society from overheard metro conversations, from shopping in malls, by visiting galeries and observing life in general around Paris. Ernaux's best subject is Ernaux. Her autobiographical novels like Cleaned Out, A Woman's Story, A Man's Place and Simple Passion succeeded brilliantly because Ernaux is mordantly critical of every characterespecially her own. As the title suggests, this isn't a meditation on Ernaux's inner workings but rather a writer's notebook of observations from which Ernaux herself is largely absent. Most of the pieces arise from rail trips between Paris and her home in Cergy-Pontoise, "a new town 40 kilometers outside of Paris." Ernaux's keenest insights are into the uncomfortable relationships between those who live on society's fringes and those more securely in its center. She describes a man leaning against a wall in a subway corridor: "He was not asking for money. Drawing level with him, one noticed that his fly was open, revealing his balls. An unbearable sighta shattering form of dignity." She recalls pedestrians who carefully avoid a section of pavement inscribed by an absent petitioner: "To buy food. I have no family.'' Contrasted with this is the tortured relationship between people and materialism. "I realize," she says, "that I am forever combing reality for signs of literature." But these are just signs. Assembled in this loose and largely unremarkable series of vignettes, they are not yet literature. (Oct.)

I devoured – not once, but twice – Fitzcarraldo’s new English edition of Simple Passion, in which the great Annie Ernaux describes the suspended animation of a love affair with a man who is not free. Every paragraph, every word, brought me closer to a state of purest yearning.’ Later in the narrative, Ernaux’s interest in the body takes her again to the butcher’s where she observes client-shopkeeper dynamics and how the butcher categorizes his customers: “A subconscious ritual is being played out here, celebrating the convivial symbolism of meat, gorged with blood, the family.” Naturally, eaters of halal and kosher meat are barred from this family and “the recurring bliss of Sunday lunches.” The butcher’s, alluded to in the introduction, becomes the fulcrum of Frenchness, an exclusionary space where the steaks are clearly marked for men and women. Further on, the meat takes on a more overtly religious meaning: anonymous figures glimpsed in the Métro or in waiting rooms . . . who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us." Go home! The man tells his dog; it slinks away, submissive, guilty. The same expressions used throughout history for children, women and dogs. Snark aside, Ernaux’s oeuvre has dealt with the consequences of trying to be “the French woman” — most notably, putting men’s desire above all and hating your own body in the process. These transgressions against the self are peppered throughout her other books that echo one another not just in content but also in the merry-go-round of their French and English titles. There is a volume entitled La Vie Exterieur (2000) published in English as Things Seen in 2010, supporting the view that Ernaux has been writing one narrative in different styles, focusing on different periods of her life.Toutes les images disparaîtront,’ Ernaux wrote in 1985, the year she got divorced, and the year she began trying to write the book she had always wanted to write. ‘All the images will disappear.’ In the first sentence of The Years, you are already on another plane – Ernaux has said that the book is almost narrated by time. The book covers the years 1941 to 2006, collaging forgotten ways of speaking, objects, brands, songs and ways of behaving, using the ‘on’ singular plural as a way of portraying collective experience. Here are the woman’s sons talking over dinner in the mid-1990s: How do French women do it? How do they stay so thin? How do they dress so well? These are questions that have plagued the universal sisterhood of women for centuries. That is why it’s crucial we read French women’s memoirs, so we can organize our lives accordingly. The slim one I have in hand is Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors, published in French as Journal de dehors in 1993, arriving somewhere in the middle of her “autofiction” career. The book, as the title suggests, gazes at the navel of not the self but of others, possibly finding the self there anyway. If Annie Ernaux were a lesser memoirist, it would be easier to lay out the bare facts of her life. She was born in Normandy in 1940, to parents who worked in factories in Lillebonne before moving to Yvetot to run a café-épicerie, but for a reader it is much easier to remember that they sold hazelnut milk chocolate but no whisky. Her parents had another daughter, Ginette, who died of diphtheria at the age of six, before Ernaux was born. Annie was sent to a private Catholic school, where she was often top of the class. She went to train as a teacher in Rouen, abandoning her studies when she realised her heart wasn’t in it. She then spent six months as an au pair in Finchley, before heading to Bordeaux to work on a PhD on Marivaux. She had an abortion when she was a student, when it was still illegal in France. At university, she met Philippe Ernaux, got married, and had two boys, Eric and David. She returned to teaching, working for 23 years at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance, a sort of French Open University. The family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the end of the RER A, on the north-west edge of Paris. Her father died in 1967 after a short illness. She wrote while her children napped, once the teaching and housework were done. Annie Ernaux reminds me of Joan Didion. Writing that is confessional, possesses the hunt for clarity, quirky observations, and wit that stays with the reader till the end. By choosing to write in the first person, I am laying myself open to criticism, which would not have been the case had I written ‘she wondered if each man she spoke to was the one they meant.’ The third person – he/she – is always somebody else, free to do whatever they choose. ‘I’ refers to oneself, the reader, and it is inconceivable, or unthinkable, for me to read my own horoscope and behave like some mushy schoolgirl. ‘I’ shames the reader.)"

Admirable for its quiet grace as well as its audacity in a willingness to note (and thus make noteworthy) the smallest parts of life. It’s a masterclass in understatement, a quality difficult to find nowadays, in literature or life.’ Pici könyv, tele szilánkokkal*. Ez az első - és egyetlen, azt hiszem -, ami nem Ernaux életét tárgyalja, noha tulajdonképpen ezek a benyomások is személyesek. Ha együtt utaztunk volna, álltunk volna sorba a hentesnél, biztosan mást vittünk volna haza élményként. The book is at once lyrical and unruly. It’s a story of fleeting encounters, overheard conversations and clear-sighted observations that will make you pay attention to the seemingly ephemeral details of ordinary life.’ The book in which these lines appear, “ Shame,” was published in 1997. (The English translation is by Tanya Leslie.) Its opening is unforgettable: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” That was in the summer of 1952, when Ernaux was eleven. It took her nearly forty-five years to try to make sense of what this terrifying event meant to her, and, by the book’s end, she is still not sure that she has. “I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” she writes. This paradoxical wish, to reveal the darkest parts of herself with such pitiless accuracy that she will be forced to fall silent once and for all, is an extraordinary expression of writerly ambition. In any case, it has still not come true. A woman’s voice, through the loudspeaker, explains the history of April Fools’ Day. Then it announces that today there’s a special on aperitifs and hi-fi equipment. The hypermarket may want to enlighten customers and show that it can play an educational role, or else it’s a commercial ploy to lessen the onslaught of advertising. I n a few years from now, in the middle of hypermarkets, we shall probably see cinema screens, promotional lectures on painting or literature, maybe even lessons on computers. A sort of peep-show corner.

Success!

They think I’m not legitimate,” Ernaux said to me. “What disgusts them is that there are people who have found, in literature, something that speaks to them, and that those people aren’t C.E.O.s or company bosses.” Ernaux is also the first French woman to win the Nobel, “and that doesn’t work for them, at all.” For years, she has dealt with sexist criticism of her work, and not just from the right. After she published “ Simple Passion,” a soul-baring account of a love affair with a married man, a literary critic at the liberal weekly Le Nouvel Observateur took to calling her Madame Ovary. French novelist/memoirist Ernaux ( A Frozen Woman, 1995, etc.) turns conversations overheard and people and places observed into a disturbingly effective documentary record of modern life.