The Swedish Academy awards its literature prize to the Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux. Speculation over the recipient of the 2022 award had been rife for weeks.
Annie Ernaux is officially crowned Nobel Prize for Literature 2022. The Swedish Academy presented its award this Thursday to the author of The Eventwho thus becomes the first French woman to win. Elle succeeds Abdulrazak Gurnah and Louise Glück, respectively crowned in 2021 and 2020.
It is “a very great honor” and a “responsibility”, the 82-year-old author told Swedish television after the announcement.
Annie Ernaux has produced, through an essentially autobiographical work, a remarkable radiography of the intimacy of a woman who has evolved with the upheavals of French society since the post-war period.
Class defector
Renaudot Prize in 1984 for At Place and finalist for the prestigious international Booker Prize in 2019, this professor of literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise has written around twenty stories in which she dissects the weight of class domination and love passion, two themes that have marked her itinerary. of a woman torn because of her popular origins.
An avowed left-wing writer, Annie Ernaux draws on Bourdieusian sociology, the discovery of which in the 1970s enabled her to identify the “social malaise” that gnawed at her as soon as she entered a private school in the 1950s. Born in 1940 , she lived until she was 18 in her parents’ “dirty, filthy, ugly, disgusting” café-grocery store in Yvetot in Haute-Normandie, from which she will extract herself thanks to an aggregation of modern letters obtained by dint of dint of intense intellectual work.
Of the Empty cupboards (1974) to Years (2008), she will follow a writing trajectory that leads her from a harsh and violent first little novel to this generous historical autobiography. In Empty Cabinetsher heroine describes with rage the two incompatible worlds in which she evolves during her adolescence: on the one hand, ignorance, filth, the vulgarity of drunken customers, the little habits of her grocer parents and on the other ” the ease, the lightness of the girls of the free school “coming from the petty bourgeoisie.
“Flat Writing”
Over the course of her stories, all published by Gallimard, the author will repair the betrayal that she considers to have committed towards her parents by devoting to them a reconciled portrait in At Place et A woman (1988).
His clinical style, devoid of any lyricism, is the subject of numerous theses. By this “flat writing”, she summons the universal in the singular story of her existence. Very quickly abandoning the novel, she renews the story of filiation and invents the “impersonal autobiography”.
With Years, she evokes her life to trace the novel of a whole 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.
The school of Beauvoir
In 2022, she resumes this story with dozens of family films shot by her former husband between 1972 and 1981. “The Super 8 years” are presented at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes.
“I consider myself very little as a singular being but as a sum of experiences, of determinations also, social, historical, sexual, of languages and continually in dialogue with the world (past and present)”, she writes in ‘L ‘writing like a knife’.
From then on, writing becomes a means of reaching and authentically expressing the intimate experience of her feminine condition modeled by Simone de Beauvoir: her failed deflowering in Shame (1997) then in girls memory (2018), her illegal abortion lived in 1963 as a social emancipation in The Event (2000), the failure of her marriage in The frozen woman (1981) or her breast cancer in The use of photography (2005). Judged by her detractors as an obscene and miserable writer, she shocks by the crude description of amorous alienation in Passion simple (1992).
“A woman who writes”
Installed since 1977 in Cergy-Pontoise, she has devoted many writings to this new town in the Parisian suburbs describing the life of her fellows whom she meets in supermarkets or the RER. In The outside newspaper (1993), outdoor life (2000) or Look at the lights my love (2014), she introduces banal subjects into literature, always with the same ethnographic rigor. In 2021, she appears in I liked living therea documentary film dedicated to Cergy.
Octogenarian, she knows a strong media exposure with the adaptation to the cinema of The Event (Prix Lumières and Lion d’Or in Venice last year) and Passion simple.
This 20th century author who claimed in 2022 to “feel a little illegitimate in the literary field” remains a reference for a whole new generation of artists and intellectuals. A true feminist icon for several generations, Annie Ernaux told AFP in May that she simply felt “woman. A woman who writes, that’s all”.
Mystery maintained
The deliberations of the Academy are always kept secret, and no names are revealed before the presentation of the prize. Nevertheless, the forecasters had mentioned several possibilities.
The French Michel Houellebecq and the Canadian Anne Carson were the favorites of the punters. The Briton Salman Rushdie, author of satanic verses and victim of an attempted murder in August, was also suspected.
Many speculations
Another very political choice in the context of the war in Ukraine would have been to crown the Russian Ludmila Oulitskaïa, declared adversary of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Finnish Sofi Oksanen or the Ukrainian Andrei Kurkov.
The name of the Russian author, exiled in Berlin has been regularly mentioned in recent years, as have the Hungarians Peter Navas and Laszlo Krasznahorkai, the Frenchwoman Maryse Condé, the Norwegians Jon Fosse and Karl Ove Knausgård, the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o , Croatian Dubravka Ugresic, Syrian Adonis, Americans Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, Israeli David Grossman, Argentinian Cesar Aira…