Annie Ernaux, the French author, who is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature has been recognised for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory”. Ernaux becomes the first Frenchwoman and the 17th female author to receive the coveted honour.
Here are five books by Noble Prize awardee Annie Ernaux which are a must read:
Les Armoires vides (trans. Cleaned Out), 1974
Les Armoires vides (trans. Cleaned Out), revolves around the story of 20-year-old woman protagonist, Denise Lesur, who suffers from the aftereffects of a back-alley abortion. Denise, alone in her college dorm room, tries to comprehend how her suffocating middle-class upbringing has brought her to such a terrible present. This moving novel talks about abortion, growing up, and coming to terms with one’s childhood.
La Place (trans. A Man’s Place), 1983
La Place (trans. A Man’s Place) is an autobiographical novel which contains the documentation of an event in the author’s life. Annie Ernaux talks about her father in ‘A Man’s Place’. Ernaux’s father was a hard and practical man who showed little affection to his family, as a result of having received little education and being valued solely for his labour since childhood.
In A Man’s Place, Ernaux’s becomes a cold observer and reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life, narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort. She examines the significance which he placed on manners and language of an individual, and how it came so naturally to him as he struggled to support his family with a grocery store and café in rural France.
L’événement (trans. Happening), 2000
L’événement (trans. Happening), throws light on a traumatic event of author Annie Ernaux’s life, where she was 23-year-old unattached woman, who discovered she is pregnant in 1963.
This is the story of a trauma Ernaux never recovered from, written forty years later from when the incident happened. She attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle in France where abortion was illegal. She finally finds an abortionist, terrified and desperate, and ends up in a hospital emergency room, where she nearly dies.
L’Occupation (trans. The Possession), 2002
In Annie Ernaux’s works, self-esteem is always an excruciatingly painful process. She revisits the strange kind of self-fulfillment that can occur when we examine ourselves in the aftermath of a love affair, and sometimes even through the eyes of one’s lost beloved.
Les Années (trans. The Years), 2008
Les Années (trans. The Years) is a memoir that follows Annie Ernaux life events from her birth in 1940 to 2006. Writing in the third person, she reflects on her upbringing in a working-class Normandy family, her years as a French teacher in a lycée, her life as a wife and mother of two sons living in the Parisian suburb of Cergy, her eventual divorce, and her transformation into the person for whom completing this book project is crucial and is woven into the grand tapestry of French political, social, and cultural history.