Exteriors

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She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. I may also be trying to discover something about myself through them, their attitudes or their conversations. One can either relate them in detail, exposing their stark, immediate nature, outside of any narrative form, or else save them for future reference, ‘making use’ of them by incorporating them into an ensemble (a novel, for instance). As a matter of fact, a lot of the entries in Exteriors read like poems, mostly due to their varying lengths and the fact that there’s this subtle, understatedness to them, which can be taken at face-value or reread and mined for universal truths.

Tonight, in the neighbourhood known as Les Linandes, a woman went by on a stretcher held by two firemen. What would be of passing interest is if Ernaux waited a decade or two for the new town to “grow old,” and then repeated the exercise. Because Ernaux has written about her mother ( A Woman's Story ), her father ( A Man's Place ) and herself ( Cleaned Out ), one can almost hear an anxious tremor in the narrator's (Ernaux's? My Ernaux odyssey continues with the latest republication by the UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place.

Strangely enough, there exists another truth, the exact opposite: when we go back to a town we left a long time ago, we imagine that the people there will still be the same, unchanged. Writing that is confessional, possesses the hunt for clarity, quirky observations, and wit that stays with the reader till the end. I felt I was riding towards the sun; it was setting beyond the criss-cross lines of pylons hurtling towards the centre of the New Town.

The author is a spectator, rarely ever participating in the world around her — unless it’s standing in line or stepping onto the train (where many of the scenes take place) to then introduce someone else. One of the key observations, which Ernaux makes in the introduction, is that for twenty years she has lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometres outside Paris.Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person’s lived environment. Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person's lived environment. In her explicatory introduction, Ernaux professes a desire to convey pure exteriority, although she acknowledges the inevitable influence of her own preoccupations upon the “random” selection of scenes. Ernaux wanted to capture images with the eye of a photographer, and then translate those captured images into her more familiar medium, the written word.

I read ones about her mother, her father, her early sexual life, an affair with an older, married man, an abortion, all in separate books, many based on detailed diaries she kept over the years. Ez az első - és egyetlen, azt hiszem -, ami nem Ernaux életét tárgyalja, noha tulajdonképpen ezek a benyomások is személyesek. Tanya Leslie was the first translator of Annie Ernaux into English and translated a number of her works, including A Woman’s Story (1991), A Man’s Place (1992), Simple Passion (1993), Shame (1998), I Remain in Darkness (1999) and Happening (2001). Again blurring the line between memoir and fiction, Ernaux continues the story of her family in journal form. Denise, a 20-year-old college student who has just had a back-alley abortion, lies alone in her dorm room and ponders her rejection of her well-meaning parents.annie ernaux's observations on everyday life are so pertinent and refreshing and hilarious that they make me want to take my headphones off on public transport. In fact, I believe that these pitiful character summaries made Exteriors even stronger; they’re honest and quick, and sound like the mind, rather than some beautified version of it. Again, she draws on diary entries she wrote while commuting on the Paris Métro, usually just observing strangers, and seeing how they help her reflect on her own life. So I think this is the last of the several brief memoirs or autofictions I have read and all in 2022 so far (! And tied together with the beautiful idea of our own life being projected on strangers, of seeking and getting a deeper understanding of the self by being observant about others.

So I got involved, heavily involved, deeply involved, right down to ending up with a tube in my womb, all because of a not-very-clever comment, all because of myself. Ponieważ to daje jej iluzję bliskości z innymi i pozwala się zastanowić nad tym jakie emocje w niej wywołują. I say that because it seems as if she wrote this book primarily to sustain the edge of her wonderful restrained, understated style of writing.

Without even looking, we manage to avoid one another’s bodies, barely centimetres apart in the throng. Although Exteriors doesn’t have the all-encompassing splendour of The Years or the emotional gravity of I Remain in Darkness, it is admirable for its quiet grace as well as its audacity in a willingness to note (and thus make noteworthy) the smallest parts of life. Committing to paper the movements, postures, and words of the people I meet gives me the illusion that I am close to them.