In an interview with “Parisien”, the author did not hide her contempt for her colleague, the subject of all the predictions for the Nobel 2022 that she finally obtained.
Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize for Literature, was delighted that her French colleague Michel Houellebecq did not have it in her place, given her “totally reactionary and anti-feminist” ideas, in an interview with the Parisian.
“Let’s have an audience with this award, given his deleterious ideas, frankly, it’s better that it’s me!”, She said in a daily interview published this Thursday on her website.
Asked whether she was happy that it wasn’t him this year, she replied, “Yes. He has totally reactionary, anti-feminist ideas, that’s nothing to say!”
“Writing… There is none”
“I really liked his first book, ‘Extension of the domain of wrestling’ (…) It was really new, this idea that wrestling was going to be played on physical appearance. But then… I I stopped reading it because of its image of women, of mothers, of mature women, its way of describing skins, sagging breasts,” she continued.
“I read his Goncourt, The Map and the territory, but writing… There is none. So it’s very translated, because it’s extremely easy to translate,” she added.
Disputed price
Crowned for “the courage and clinical acuity” of her largely autobiographical work, Annie Ernaux is the first French woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. This award was not unanimous in France, especially among male critics and writers. “Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize for Literature: what if it sucked”, headlined the critic Nicolas Ungemuth in Le Figaro.
After the announcement of the price, Le Figaro republished a 2016 column by Frédéric Beigbeder which was ironic about the themes of his works: “in half a century, Annie Ernaux has successively written about her father, her mother, her lover, her abortion, her mother’s illness, her mourning, his hypermarket (…) on his failed deflowering during the summer of 1958, in summer camp (…) The event is told fifty years later with incredible seriousness”.