Annie Ernaux

A woman plots the emotional and physical course of an all-consuming affair with a married man, during which she loses herself in her passion before the relationship comes to an end. By the author of A Woman's Story. Reprint.

Simple Passion

Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present--even projections into the future--photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns."

The Years

A New York Times Notable Book A Woman’s Story is Annie Ernaux’s "deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris." She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love. In this quietly powerful tribute, Ernaux attempts to do her mother the greatest justice she can: to portray her as the individual she was. She writes, "I believe I am writing about my mother because it is my turn to bring her into the world."

A Woman's Story

The author recalls her traumatic experience with abortion as a young literature student in the early 1960s--an event that left her hemorrhaging in a Paris dormitory.

Happening

The French author of three New York Times Notable Books of the Year presents a novel written in the form of journal entries over seven years that records the tumultuous life of random strangers. Tour. IP.

Exteriors

Il n'est jamais entré dans un musée, il ne lisait que Paris-Normandie et se servait de son Opinel pour manger. Ouvrier devenu petit commerçant, il espérait que sa fille, grâce aux études, serait mieux que lui.
Cette fille, Annie Ernaux, refuse l'oubli des origines. Elle retrace la vie et la mort de celui qui avait conquis sa petite "place au soleil". Et dévoile aussi la distance, douloureuse, survenue entre elle, étudiante, et ce père aimé qui lui disait : "Les livres, la musique, c'est bon pour toi. Moi, je n'en ai pas besoin pour vivre."
Ce récit dépouillé possède une dimension universelle.

La Place

" Depuis des années, je tourne autour de cet événement de ma vie. Lire dans un roman le récit d'un avortement me plonge dans un saisissement sans images ni pensées, comme si les mots se changeaient instantanément en sensation violente. De la même façon, entendre par hasard La javanaise, J'ai la mémoire qui flanche, n'importe quelle chanson qui m'a accompagnée durant cette période, me bouleverse. "

L'événement

Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize–shortlisted author of The Years. In A Girl’s Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another’s will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man’s, and then he moves on, leaving her without a “master,” bereft. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.

A Girl's Story

The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat. Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.” She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

Getting Lost

"La photo en noir et blanc d'une petite fille en maillot de bain foncé, sur une plage de galets. En fond, des falaises. Elle est assise sur un rocher plat, ses jambes robustes étendues bien droites devant elle, les bras en appui sur le rocher, les yeux fermés, la tête légèrement penchée, souriant. Une épaisse natte brune ramenée par-devant, l'autre laissée dans le dos. Tout révèle le désir de poser comme les stars dans Cinémonde ou la publicité d'Ambre Solaire, d'échapper à son corps humiliant et sans importance de petite fille. Au dos : août 1949, Sotteville-sur-Mer." Au travers de photos et de souvenirs laissés par les événements, les mots et les choses, Annie Ernaux nous fait ressentir le passage des années, de l'après-guerre à aujourd'hui. En même temps, elle inscrit l'existence dans une forme nouvelle d'autobiographie, impersonnelle et collective.

Les années

Anna Moschovakis

A woman abandons an unremarkable relationship, but then finds herself unable to come to grips with the idea of the man being with another woman.

The Possession

A New York Times Notable Book Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, 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 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. A Man's Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman's Story.

A Man's Place

Washington Post Top Memoir of 1999 An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter’s attachment to her mother, and of both women’s strength and resiliency. "I Remain in Darkness" recounts Annie’s attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer’s disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman’s gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. "I Remain in Darkness" is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with raw emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to apprehend her own life’s particular music.

I Remain in Darkness

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Annie Ernaux's most recent book, dazzling and breathtaking, published in France in 2022, is about her affair with a man 30 years her junior. “A sublime book.” —Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle “Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as both a rigorous study of life and an experiment. These fragments of living, however evanescent, are precious, irreplaceable, like a skin that never fades.” —Caroline Montpetit in Le Devoir The Young Man is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time— together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the “scandalous girl” she once was, but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing. It was first published in France in 2022.

The Young Man

Yalin Tutku

Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.

Babamin Yeri

"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.

Annie Ernaux

About

Books

Join the club