Name: Exteriors
Rating: 3.75 (6 reviews)
ISBN: 9781888363319

Annie Ernaux

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

Kat Albanese

Contrary to a real theatre, members of the audience here avoid looking at the actors and affect not to hear their performance. Embarrassed to see real life making a spectacle of itself, and not the opposite.

It is outside my own life that my past existence lies: in passengers commuting on the Métro or the RER; in shoppers glimpsed on escalators at Auchan or in the Galleries Lafayette; in complete strangers who cannot know that they possess part of my story; in faces and bodies which I shall never see again. In the same way, I myself, anonymous among the bustling crowds on streets and in department stores, must secretly play a role in the lives of others.

Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person's lived environment. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux's books - the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.

I am sure many of us observe the cities that we live in and the people who reside in them, but few of us are as astute and eloquent as Annie Ernaux.

Slice of a thousand lives. The art of noticing. Thoughtful, sentimental and mostly forgettable.

Rose

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE Taking the form of random journal entries over seven years, Exteriors captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris. Poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive.

Exteriors

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