A Man's Place: Annie Ernaux

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Ernaux’s bare-boned, fragmented prose style is often harsh on her subject matter. She observes her parents’ hard work and dedication to support their family with sympathetic snobbishness. Her father mispronounced the name of her school teachers, “as if the normal pronunciation implied that he was intimate with the closed world that these words evoked, a liberty he was not prepared to take”.

A Man’s Place | novel by Ernaux | Britannica

An affecting portrait of a man whose own peasant upbringing typified the adage that a child should never be better educated than his parents.’ Ernaux’s father grew up in a poor farming family in Normandy and the book begins with his death, which came exactly two months after Ernaux passed her exams for a teaching certificate. The proximity of these two events makes her reflect on the gulf that had widened between Ernaux and her father as she grew up. As she progressed through school, attended university and entered the world of the highly educated, he, hardened by a life of physical labour, looked on her achievements with suspicion, if a quiet admiration too.My father died exactly two months later, to the day. He was sixty-seven years old and he and my mother had been running a grocery store and café in a quiet area of Y— (Seine-Maritime), not far from the train station. He had intended to retire the following year. Quite often, and just for a moment, I can’t recollect which came first: that windy April in Lyon when I stood waiting at the Croix-Rousse bus stop, or that stifling month of June, the month of his death. The few outbursts Ernaux permits her teenage self are invariably to do with language: “How do you expect me to speak properly if you keep on making mistakes?” Language was Ernaux’s father’s embarrassment, but it’s Ernaux’s, too. A book cannot capture everything – it can only do its best. Slowly and with difficulty, Ernaux’s fiction sets out to tell the story of her father against this matter-of-fact adage. 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 Placereveals the shame thathaunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizesthe importance he attributed to manners and languagethat came so unnaturally to him as he struggled toprovide for his family with a grocery store and caféin rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernauxgrows up to become the uncompromising observernow familiar to the world, while her father matures intoold age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and fora daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly admires. On 6 October 2022, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This review of her memoir “A Man’s Place” was first published in November 2020.

Annie Ernaux and the brutal art of memoir - New Statesman

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. Revisiting painful periods is hardly new territory for writers, but Ernaux distills a particular power from the exercise.’ Writing, too, proves itself a stoic yet inflexible medium. Late in A Man’s Place, Ernaux writes, “I remember the title of a book, L’Expérience des limites. I was so disappointed when I started reading it, it was only about metaphysics and literature.” She evinces a disappointment that language, so appealing, cannot reach beyond theory. In doing so, she reflects on its inadequacies in capturing her father’s provincial, simple, utterly unremarkable life. Engagement with real social and personal experience is, apparently, not to be found in the books for which Ernaux’s erudite narrator yearns. In Happening, a stirring account of the illegal abortion she had in Paris in the early Sixties, Ernaux realised the power one wields in writing true stories that involve others. When she suffered a haemorrhage and was admitted to hospital, a young doctor treated her poorly. “If I had been told the name of the junior doctor who was on duty that night – 20-21 January, 1964 – and if I still remembered it, nothing would stop me from divulging it here,” she wrote.No-one writes about family relationships with the nuance, both emotional and analytical, that Ernaux does, and such a reflective, self-critical perspective is even more precious. Her exploration of language in their household is sharp …It might initially be read as a cold portrait, but the emotions and passionate thought rage through the taut writing. Likened to Simone de Beauvoir for her astute chronicling of a generation, Ernaux’s prose is intimate and unforgettable.’ When we get to the end of the book, we still do not feel like we fully know the man whose life it depicts. A Man’s Place marks its own reliance on absence by refusing to satisfy. Neither does it tell us much about Ernaux’s own life, despite the elements of autobiography. The years comprising her teacher training, her university degree and her marriage are blurred. Any emotional response to her father’s death – or even to his life – is largely absent. The text, released in an updated translation by Tanya Leslie, is a concise piece of autofiction: a portrait of Ernaux’s father’s life and death which stumbles, self-reflexively, at realising a complete conception of the man.