Over the past year or so, I made my way through a big portion of Anne Ernaux’s writing in translation. Below is a compilation of my writings (written at different times as I finished the books) reflecting on my thoughts on this beautiful writer whose dark words meld local and global politics, self-reflection, relationships, and growth as a modern woman in the 20th century.
GETTING LOST
As many other people did, I am sure, I took out a stack of Ernaux’s books from the library once I got around to reading the 2022 Nobel Laureate. This book is a translation of her diaries from 1988-1990 where she had an affair with a married Russian diplomat who was much younger than her as he travelled to do his job. He isn’t so much the focus of her writing, rather she lyrically explores her own internality of being a woman who exists to be used by him as his “mother and whore,” and exacting the desires and sexual confidence he lacks in his marriage. Her palpable loneliness follows her through every day of missing “S”, awaiting his phone calls and never knowing when the rug will finally be pulled out from under their relationship. She aches for him sadly, and she navigates her late forties in this time with her fears of contracting AIDS from him and what she suspects is his “Don Juan” line of women that his narcissism has lined up in every city he visits. It really puts a strong, clear perspective of the life lived as the other woman, written beautifully and translated by Alison L Strayer in vivid detail. I am not sure this relationship and journal would have been as gorgeous, tragic, and erotic in the hands of anyone less well-read and worldly as Ernaux, and my time with her as she suffered through the unknowns of this portion of her life was quite enjoyable. Reflecting on my own relationships and mistakes, it brings a vibrancy to that which we lose and expect from lovers no matter the circumstances. Loneliness can be a weight on one’s shoulders or the key that opens the bird cage, and in these journals, I think she navigates both quite beautifully.
HAPPENING
Catching up on 2022’s Nobel Laureate, Happening is the second book I picked up after Getting Lost, and it was a much more powerful, captivating, and heartbreaking book. Clocking in at a slim 98 pages, this tells the story of an abortion. Ernaux presents a harrowing ordeal that tries to navigate the internal and striking emotional labyrinth of what it means to become pregnant and make the difficult decision to abort – something that I think is a nebulous concept even leading up to it for the person involved as much as it is for the people that make the topic a heartless battleground out of something they will never have to experience. There is no question here that the experience was an excruciating one; one that Ernaux says genuinely prepared her for motherhood later. There are a few scenes that are written so perfectly, so horrifically, that while I will never have to face the brutality of the before and after of the fallout of what is always a woman’s most difficult decision, I have all the compassion and empathy in the world for any woman that must go through it. This short book is the hurricane of those choices – choices made in a country that had a 10-week cutoff at the time that may also lead to the cutoff of the very life they could continue to live happily and healthily with a family as Ernaux eventually did.
A GIRL’S STORY
This was perhaps the third or fourth of Ernaux’s work that I read after she won the Nobel, and I found this one to be one of the best. This book explores the young life of the author before she became an author, and ultimately the road that led her to writing through a mature, controlling relationship with a man that brought her heartbreak, abuse, and strangely enough, some degree of pleasure. But the man leaves, and in doing so, Ernaux develops into a self-sufficient writer who can fully discover what she is capable of without the controls this relationship fenced around her. There was something about the coming of age aspect that really resonated with me compared to the others I read, and it was a pleasure to experience.
THE YEARS
This was the last of the books I read by Nobel winner Anne Ernaux in my little marathon readthrough of the prolific French writer. This was one of my favorites – her extreme autobiographical style seems to heavily rely on her internality and relationships most of the time, but when she truly shines is in works like this one. The Years tells the story of her life over the span of the 1960s through the early 21st century, but combines that with external social demands and events of France and the world woven through her experience, and it creates this beautiful tapestry that seems to accelerate faster and faster as the piece moves downhill into the extremity of speed that is her later years. In many ways it mirrors the life experience beautifully, a rollercoaster speeding faster and faster as one reaches older age, but her experience really magnifies the social and political tumult of the sixties when things seemed to matter more and have more vibrancy. In this piece, as reality gets greyer and more complicated and the global machine changes to strange boundaries of rights and everything we fight for gets blurrier and blurrier, time speeds and we embrace the powerful mechanics Ernaux’s beautiful mirror to ourselves. A great piece from a great writer.
Garrett Zecker 