Ernaux, Annie (b. 1940). French novelist. Ernaux's writing is strongly marked by her childhood and working-class origins in Normandy. Her early novels have strong feminist themes: Les Armoires vides (1974) is narrated by a student from a working-class background undergoing an abortion; Ce qu'ils disent ou rien (1977) has a younger female narrator who finds herself confronted one summer by hitherto unsuspected gender roles and sexual codes; La Femme gelée (1981) is the narrative of an intellectual married woman, again of humble social origins, whose ambitions and desires have been smothered by marriage and motherhood. ‘Je cherche ma ligne de fille et de femme’, writes the narrator, echoing Ernaux's project in examining the social and cultural meaning that her gender holds. With La Place (1981) and Une femme (1988) she takes a new direction, producing narratives which combine an autobiographical, historical, and social dimension. La Place focuses on her father, exploring her relationship with him and the abyss which her middle-class culture acquired through education has created between them. The text lovingly recreates her father's habits, tastes, and language. Une femme, written immediately after her mother's death, similarly evokes her mother's life, this time accompanied by the particular ambivalences of daughter-mother love and identification.
[Elizabeth Fallaize]
Annie Ernaux (born in Lillebonne, Seine-Maritime on 1 September 1940) is a French writer.[1]
She won the Prix Renaudot in 1984[2] for her book La Place, an autobiographical narrative focusing on her relationship with her father and her experiences growing up in a small town in France, and her subsequent process of moving into adulthood and away from her parents' place of origin.[3][4]
As a child, Annie Ernaux lived in Yvetot in Normandy.[5] Very early in her career, she turned away from fiction to concentrate on autobiography.[6] Her work combines historic and individual experiences. She charts her parents' social progression (La place, La honte), her adolescence (Ce qu’ils disent ou rien), her marriage (La femme gelée), her abortion (L’événement), Alzheimer's disease (Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit), the death of her mother (Une femme) and breast cancer (L’usage de la photo).[5] Ernaux also wrote L'écriture comme un couteau (which should be understood as Writing as sharp as a knife) with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet.[5]
Her latest novel Les années (Gallimard, 2008) is considered her 'magnum opus' and was very well received by the French critics.[7] In this latter book Ernaux writes of herself in third person point of view (elle) for the first time. She gives a vivid look at French society from after Second World War until today.[8] It is the poignant social history of a woman and of the society she lived in. The female character in the book has looked death in the eye; she describes what she realizes will soon be disappearing and how relative that all is, if she should disappear too.
Many of her works have been translated into English and published by Seven Stories Press.
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