Annie Ernaux: La Place

 

My goal for this week was to read a work by Annie Ernaux (born 1940) in the original French. I picked La Place, a rather short memoir of her father's life. Reading it was not as hard as I had feared, though I did look up quite a few words in the online translation tool Deepl.com. Ernaux wrote La Place in 1982-1983, looking back at her father's life from his birth in 1899 until his death in 1967. The English translation, which I did not read, is titled A Man's Place. Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2022.

Respect for her father is the principal theme of Ernaux’s narrative. She begins with a description of his death, and then tells his history in chronological order, starting with a review of the life of his father, who worked as a farm laborer and never learned to read. As a youth, her father was in a semi-military boys’ school/camp in World War I. He was always a working man, at first as a laborer and later in his life a small businessman. 

Above all, she presents her father’s life without sentimentality or maukishness. In writing about him, she also develops her own story in relation to him: she develops the contrast between her father and herself with clarity and a light touch. Born during the start of the fighting, as her parents were fleeing the battle front, she was a “child of the war” who survived despite the privations during Nazi occupation. Later, she was a successful student in the local schools in the small town where they lived, and went on to higher education and success as a teacher and later as a writer. Her father was in some ways uncomprehending of her academic success, though also very proud. In the same way as it began, this short book ends with her father’s death, at the time when the author was just beginning her career as a school teacher. 

In the 1980s when she wrote this piece Ernaux wasn't yet a world-famous author, but she had already published at least three books which were well-recieved. This is only the second of her books that I have read, and I find it interesting and readable. I think the engagement of a writer in the events of her life as depicted in this memoir represents an original type of literature, though I believe it has had a variety of imitators. I am often puzzled by the selection process of the Nobel committee, which is in fact quite controversial, and I can’t say I have a clue why this one was chosen for the prize last year, unless the author’s political activism was an influence, which is always possible.

Review © 2023 mae sander for maefood.blogspot.com

Shared with Paris in July