ANNIE ERNAUX: PROVOCATEUR
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ANNIE ERNAUX: PROVOCATEUR
Annie Ernaux offers an appropriately goading opening to her autobiographical novel The Yearswith the line: “All the images will disappear.” When asked if the book was born out of a desire to persist in a world in which all existence is inherently fleeting, Ernaux answered that time is actually “the main character,” a response that captures just a fragment of the provocative, perennial questions so often proposed by the now-Nobelist.
Ernaux’s name tends to be attached to mentions of her illegal abortion in 1960s France or her affairs, although it’s her deft handling of time and all of its complexities that’s perhaps her most tempting quality as a writer. “Literature appeared to me as the only means to reach what I call either truth or reality,” she recently said. “It is a way to make things clear, not in a simple manner—on the contrary, to write things makes them more complex. It is a way, also, that so long as something has not been written it doesn’t really exist.”
The literary hunters among us might be able to track down copies of Ernaux’s largely sold-out body of work before the next printings, but for those of us who prefer to let time unfold as it does in true Ernaux fashion, we’ve compiled a shortlist of related essays, interviews, films, and quips to give you a dose of the provocateur while you wait:
1.
“In her exhaustive reckonings with her own life, one finds a search for lost time that exposes the unstable bounds and incoherencies of meaning in our own narratives of its passing.”
2.
The Super 8 Years, a series of home videos filmed by Ernaux and her family between 1972 to 1981.
3.
“There is an intimacy to Ernaux’s work, created in part from the rawness of her details—her openness about sex, about the illness and death of her parents, about her own abjectness in affairs with middling men—and also from the way that she reveals her process to the reader as she writes.”
4.
“Essentially, I want to put myself at a distance, the greatest distance between what I’ve lived, who I am — it’s about being able to distance yourself.”
5.
Plus some suitably salacious internet commentary a la Publisher’s Brunch
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