My family still give each other far too many presents at Christmas, but I’m not complaining. Among the many thoughtful gifts I received recently were these two tiny books by Annie Ernaux. The first is the story of a sexual relationship the writer had with a much younger man when she was in her mid 50s; the second is the text of her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm in December 2022. Each of them includes about 20 pages of supplementary material, with a lot of overlap between the books: photographs, a ten-page self-written biography, praise for Ernaux’s other books. They’re clearly designed to catch impulse buyers at the till, but they are written by the incomparable Annie Ernaux and I love them.
Neither book has a page 76, or even a page 47, so my usual arbitrary blogging practice is stymied.
The Young Man (Le jeune homme © 2022, translated by Alison L Strayer, Seven Stories Press 2023)
Page 7 of The Young Man is its epigraph:
If I don’t write things down, they
haven’t been carried through to completion,
they have only been lived.
Which captures perfectly the nature of this book. It serves to complete a strangely inconclusive episode in the writer’s life.
Dates at the end of the text indicate that it was written over a span of time, from 1998 to 2000, perhaps immediately after the relationship ended, and then prepared for publication – rewritten? – in 2022. It shows the signs of both dates. There’s the freshness of description of, say, sleeping together in his cold student flat, or of feeling the gaze of other people when they lie on the beach together, a gaze that neither of them would have attracted solo. And then there are reflections that have had time to mature:
In more than one domain – literature, theatre, bourgeois customs – I was his initiator, but the things I experienced because of him were also initiatory. My main reason for wanting our story to continue was that, in a sense, it was already over and I was a fictional character within it.
(page 28)
After that last comment, she continues: ‘I was aware that this entailed a kind of cruelty towards this younger man who was doing things for the first time.’
There are at least two high-profile fictional works around at the moment in which an older woman has a sexual ‘affair’ with a boy, Ian McEwan’s novel The Lessons and Todd Haynes’s movie May December. This is not that. This unnamed young man was in his twenties, and Annie Ernaux was not his teacher. There is no question of criminality, but some of the same ethical issues arise. She was an admired cultural figure to whom he could barely speak when they first met in person. She does not spare herself in the writing, but nor does she rush to judgement. As that tiny excerpt illustrates, class is always an issue, and there is a constant sense of the feedback loop between her life and her art.
The copious photos that the publishers have included to make up a decent number of pages attest to the fact that she was, and is, gorgeous. The young man didn’t love her just to learn bourgeois customs.
I will write to avenge my people (©2023, translated by Alison L Strayer, Fitzcarraldo Press 2023)
The title of Ernaux’s Nobel lecture comes from something she wrote in her diary in her early 20s: ‘J’écrirai pour venger ma race.‘ She expands on this sentence in the lecture:
I proudly and naively believed that writing books, becoming a writer, as the last in a line of landless labourers, factory workers and shopkeepers, people despised for their manners, their accent, their lack of education, would be enough to redress the social injustice linked to social class at birth.
(page 12)
The lecture traces the way she moved away from this goal, until she was brought back to it ‘through byroads that were unseen and proximate’. And it explains beautifully her central preoccupation with telling intimate stories from her own life (The Young Man among them):
This is how I conceived my commitment to writing, which does not consist of writing ‘for’ a category of readers, but in writing ‘from’ my experience as a woman and an immigrant of the interior; and from my longer and longer memory of the years I have lived, and from the present, an endless provider of the images and words of others. This commitment through which I pledge myself in writing is supported by the belief, which has become a certainty, that a book can contribute to change in private life, help to shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed, and enable beings to reimagine themselves.
(pages 19-20)
When the unspeakable is brought to light, it is political.
(Alison L Strayer has rendered both this lecture and The Young Man into impeccable English. I do wonder, though, whether ‘internal migrant’ might have been better than ‘immigrant of the interior’. I haven’t read the original, but I believe Ernaux is referring to her ‘migration’ from rural working class to the lettered bourgeoisie as opposed to migration between countries.)
There’s a lot more. If you see this little book on the front counter as you’re leaving a bookshop, let yourself be tempted.
Me fail? I fly! 