Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her exams for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation in A Man's Place reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires.
'Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir's role of chronicler to a generation.' - Margaret Drabble
Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her exams for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation in A Man's Place reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires.
'Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir's role of chronicler to a generation.' - Margaret Drabble
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, have become contemporary classics in France. The Years won the Prix Renaudot in France in 2008, the Premio Strega in Italy in 2016, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life's work.
'A lesser writer would turn these experiences into misery memoirs,
but Ernaux does not ask for our pity - or our admiration. It's
clear from the start that she doesn't much care whether we like her
or not, because she has no interest in herself as an individual
entity. She is an emblematic daughter of emblematic French parents,
part of an inevitable historical process, which includes breaking
away. Her interest is in examining the breakage... Ernaux is the
betrayer and her father the betrayed: this is the narrative
undertow that makes A Man's Place so lacerating.'? Frances Wilson,
Telegraph
'Not simply a short biography of man manacled to class assumptions,
this is also, ironically, an exercise in the art of unsentimental
writing... The biography is also self-reflexive in its inquiry and
suggests the question: what does it mean to contain a life within a
number of pages?'? Mia Colleran, Irish Times
'Ernaux understands that writing about her parents is a form of
betrayal. That she writes about their struggle to understand the
middle-class literary world into which she has moved makes that
betrayal all the more painful. But still she does it - and it is
thrilling to read Ernaux working out, word by word, what she deems
appropriate to include in each text. In being willing to show her
discomfort, her disdain and her honest, careful consideration of
the dilemmas of writing about real, lived lives, Ernaux has struck
upon a bold new way to write memoir.' --? Ellen Pierson-Hagger, New
Statesman
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