Reading Annie Ernaux, 2022 Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
French novelist and memoirist Annie Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Nobel committee especially noted “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” Her work, even her novels, is deeply infused with autobiography as she unflinchingly explores the events of her life and her relationships. Her first book, Les armoires vides/Cleaned Out, a fictionalized account of her illegal abortion, was published in 1974, and translated into English in 1990. Considered one of France's most important literary voices, many translations of her books have followed. Below you can find both translated and French-language titles in the Library's collections ready for you to discover.
Simple Passion
translated by Tanya Leslie
A woman plots the emotional and physical course of an all-consuming affair with a married man, during which she loses herself in her passion before the relationship comes to an end.
A Man's Place
translated by Tanya Leslie
A daughter must come to terms with her formative years as she writes an unflinching portrait of her father, a cafe owner whose life has become very alien to her.
The Years
translated by Alison L. Strayer
The author describes her life in France from 1941 to 2006, mixing personal history and memory with descriptions of the popular culture of each decade.
A Girl's Story
translated by Alison L. Strayer
Ernaux revisits the night 50 years earlier when she found herself submerged and controlled by another person's desire and willpower. It is the summer of 1958, the year she turned 18. And then the man she gave herself to moves on. She has submitted her will to his, and now she finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that until now she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here was the vital, violent, and dolorous origin of her writing life, her writer's identity, built out of shame, violence, betrayal.
Happening
translated by Tanya Leslie
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
Exteriors
translated by Alison L. Strayer
Taking the form of random journal entries over seven years, Exteriors captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris.
The Possession
translated by Anna Moschovakis
A woman abandons an unremarkable relationship, but then finds herself unable to come to grips with the idea of the man being with another woman.
Shame
translated by Tanya Leslie
"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.
A Woman's Story
translated by Tanya Leslie
Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris."
I Remain in Darkness
translated by Tanya Leslie
Recounts Ernaux’s attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer’s disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman’s gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent.
A Frozen Woman
translated by Linda Coverdale
Charts Ernaux's teenage awakening, and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession—with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is thirty years old, a teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. She has felt her enthusiasm and curiosity, her strength and her happiness, slowly ebb under the weight of her daily routine. The very condition that everyone around her seems to consider normal and admirable for a woman is killing her.
En Francais
Les armoires vides
Ça suffit d'être une vicieuse, une cachottière, une fille poisseuse et lourde vis-à-vis des copines de classe, légères, libres, pures de leur existence... Fallait encore que je me mette à mépriser mes parents. Tous les péchés, tous les vices. Personne ne pense mal de son père ou de sa mère. Il n'y a que moi." Un roman âpre, pulpeux, celui d'une déchirure sociale.
Les années
La photo en noir et blanc d'une petite fille en maillot de bain foncé, sur une plage de galets. Au dos : »août 1949, Sotteville-sur-Mer.» Au travers de photos et de souvenirs laissés par les événements, les mots et les choses, Annie Ernaux donne à ressentir le passage des années, de l'après-guerre à aujourd'hui. En même temps, elle inscrit l'existence dans une forme nouvelle d'autobiographie, impersonnelle et collective.
Ce qu'ils disent ou rien
Histoire d'une adolescente comme les autres, qui cherche à communiquer, à comprendre. Mais rien, dans le langage de ses parents, de l'étudiant qu'elle a rencontré, dans les mots des livres même, ne coïncide avec la réalité de ce qu'elle vit et elle se trouve renvoyée à la solitude.
Mémoire de fille
Ernaux replonge dans l'été 1958, celui de sa première nuit avec un homme, à la colonie de S dans l'Orne. Nuit dont l'onde de choc s'est propagée violemment dans son corps et sur son existence durant deux années. S'appuyant sur des images indélébiles de sa mémoire, des photos et des lettres écrites à ses amies, elle interroge cette fille qu'elle a été dans un va-et-vient entre hier et aujourd'hui.
L'occupation
"J'avais quitté W. Quelques mois après, il m'a annoncé qu'il allait vivre avec une femme, dont il a refusé de me dire le nom. À partir de ce moment, je suis tombée dans la jalousie. L'image et l'existence de l'autre femme n'ont cessé de m'obséder, comme si elle était entrée en moi. C'est cette occupation que je décris."
Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.