Winner this Thursday of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Annie Ernaux has been exploring for more than 40 years the upheavals of French society, through the prism of her own life.
Annie Ernaux, winner this Thursday, October 6, of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is the first French writer to obtain this distinction. Described by young feminists as a “feminist rock star” has never ceased to tell, through her own experience, the evolutions of French society.
The one who lived until she was 18 in her parents’ “dirty, dirty, ugly, disgusting” café-grocery store in Yvetot in Haute-Normandie, is a major voice of class defectors in literature, a theme that she has been exploring for 40 years in his work.
She has written about twenty stories, where she dissects the weight of class domination and amorous passion, two themes that have marked her itinerary as a woman torn because of her working-class origins.
• “The Event”, 2000
Recently adapted to the cinema by director Audrey Diwan, The Event, published in 2000, recounts her journey to have a clandestine abortion in 1964, 10 years before the legalization of abortion in France. Very badly received on its release, the book is today more topical than ever. “I have always been convinced that nothing was ever won for women”, she delivered to Humanity in 2014.
• “La Place”, 1984
In this novel, which earned her the Renaudot prize in 1984, Annie Ernaux evokes the life of her father, then recently deceased. For the sake of authenticity, the writer adopts a “flat writing”, to describe the life, very modest, of her father. She describes there “a very small social ascent”, a “life where there was a lot of embarrassment”, as she pointed out on the set ofApostropheexplaining “with that you can’t make a novel”.
• “The Years”, 2008
It is considered the centerpiece of his work. With Years, Annie Ernaux evokes her life to trace the novel of an entire generation, that of the children of the war marked by existentialism in the 1950s and sexual liberation. Through the allusion to objects, words, songs, television programs, she restores a truth of her time.
“It is both the story of my life but also that of thousands of women who have also been in search of freedom and emancipation,” she told AFP in May 2022.
• “The frozen woman”, 1981
In “La femme gelée” (1981), Annie Ernaux continues her self-fiction work by analyzing her own life: from childhood to adulthood, from young girl full of dreams to frozen woman.
She tells what it is to be a girl, a woman, a mother in a society that she still considers patriarchal. She recounts the discovery of social differences between women and men, the violence of this inequality. The book also looks back on the disintegration of her marriage and her role as a wife in 1970s France.
• “Girl’s memory”, 2016
With this book, Annie Ernaux sets off in search of the “girl of 58”. This girl is her. From the first pages of the book, like a warning, it warns the reader. What she is about to tell him “is the text always missing. Always put back. The unspeakable hole”.
This missing text that she has been omitting for 50 years is the story of her first night, the summer of 1958, with a man. This “left” girl who knew nothing about life and who had never left her native Normandy. But this text is not only that of the discovery of eroticism. It is also his first foray, brutal, into the adult world.
“What happened that summer is something that later I will write that we don’t come back,” she said on the set of The Great Library in 2016.