Exteriors

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Later in the narrative, Ernaux’s interest in the body takes her again to the butcher’s where she observes client-shopkeeper dynamics and how the butcher categorizes his customers: “A subconscious ritual is being played out here, celebrating the convivial symbolism of meat, gorged with blood, the family.” Naturally, eaters of halal and kosher meat are barred from this family and “the recurring bliss of Sunday lunches.” The butcher’s, alluded to in the introduction, becomes the fulcrum of Frenchness, an exclusionary space where the steaks are clearly marked for men and women. Further on, the meat takes on a more overtly religious meaning: Admirable for its quiet grace as well as its audacity in a willingness to note (and thus make noteworthy) the smallest parts of life. It’s a masterclass in understatement, a quality difficult to find nowadays, in literature or life.’ Hiába apróka a könyv, nem könnyen fogyasztható. Izgalmas, mert úgy mesél Annie Ernauxról, hogy azt a világ apró rebbenései és a krónikás ezekről alkotott benyomásai mögé rejti, azaz egyáltalán nem személytelen. Szerettem, mert más mint az autofikciói, és egy olyan életbe enged betekintést, amiről én a nyolcvanas években nem is álmodhattam. I bought a copy of Marie-Claire at the station in the New Town. This month’s horoscope: ‘You will meet a wonderful man.’ Throughout the day I wondered whether each man I spoke to was the one they meant.

Graffiti plays an important role throughout the text. Of course, there’s something bleak about a new town already vandalized, but it also signifies verve and humanity. Ernaux does a marvelous job balancing the two and showing that blemishes are a part of life, and should be appreciated as such: “On the walls of the railroad station in Cergy, after the October riots, one could read: ALGERIA I LOVE YOU, with blood-red flowers between ‘Algeria’ and ‘I.’” Pici könyv, tele szilánkokkal*. Ez az első - és egyetlen, azt hiszem -, ami nem Ernaux életét tárgyalja, noha tulajdonképpen ezek a benyomások is személyesek. Ha együtt utaztunk volna, álltunk volna sorba a hentesnél, biztosan mást vittünk volna haza élményként. Her first book, Les Armoires vides ( Cleaned Out), a novel depicting her early life and her abortion, was published by Gallimard in 1974, when she was 34. Her mother died in 1986 after living with dementia for several years. While her mother was ill she had an affair with a married man; the year before her mother died, she divorced Philippe. In 2000 she retired from teaching; at last she would have the space and time to work on the book she had dreamed of for so long. But then, cancer was discovered in her breast. She wrote all the way through her treatment, recovered, and Les Années eventually came out in 2008 in France (and as The Years in the English translation by Alison Strayer, published in 2018). She became more famous still, the first living woman to have her work appear in the Gallimard Quarto series (the cooler younger sister of the Pléiade), nominated for the Man Booker International, winner of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo. Her children had children; she had other relationships, and sometimes the men moved into the house in Cergy, which she kept in the divorce. Now in her eighties, she still lives in Cergy. There is a ghostlike quality to Exteriors, even in the title. The author is a spectator, rarely ever participating in the world around her — unless it’s standing in line or stepping onto the train (where many of the scenes take place) to then introduce someone else. It is very reminiscent of David Antin’s “talk poems.” As a matter of fact, a lot of the entries in Exteriors read like poems, mostly due to their varying lengths and the fact that there’s this subtle, understatedness to them, which can be taken at face-value or reread and mined for universal truths. Although, in my opinion, both methods are equally fruitful.French novelist/memoirist Ernaux ( A Frozen Woman, 1995, etc.) turns conversations overheard and people and places observed into a disturbingly effective documentary record of modern life. Much of what Ernaux transmits—what it is to grow up working class in a society that is contemptuous of workers; what it is to be a woman dispossessed of her body by the laws of the state, or by the overpowering prerogatives of desire—has made her a literary model, even a hero, to those who have shared similar experiences or points of view. Ernaux’s book “ Happening,” in which she describes seeking an illegal abortion as a twenty-three-year-old student, is a feminist touchstone; it was adapted, last year, into a movie by the director Audrey Diwan. Writers like Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye are openly indebted to Ernaux in both substance and style. Ernaux has been asked if she is proud to have been adopted as a kind of literary godmother, or even as a spokesperson, but she feels that “pride” is the wrong word. “I never wanted to write for,” Ernaux told me. “I write from.” Still, she was moved by the joy with which readers greeted the Nobel announcement. She considered the prize “a collective” achievement. Ernaux's best subject is Ernaux. Her autobiographical novels like Cleaned Out, A Woman's Story, A Man's Place and Simple Passion succeeded brilliantly because Ernaux is mordantly critical of every characterespecially her own. As the title suggests, this isn't a meditation on Ernaux's inner workings but rather a writer's notebook of observations from which Ernaux herself is largely absent. Most of the pieces arise from rail trips between Paris and her home in Cergy-Pontoise, "a new town 40 kilometers outside of Paris." Ernaux's keenest insights are into the uncomfortable relationships between those who live on society's fringes and those more securely in its center. She describes a man leaning against a wall in a subway corridor: "He was not asking for money. Drawing level with him, one noticed that his fly was open, revealing his balls. An unbearable sighta shattering form of dignity." She recalls pedestrians who carefully avoid a section of pavement inscribed by an absent petitioner: "To buy food. I have no family.'' Contrasted with this is the tortured relationship between people and materialism. "I realize," she says, "that I am forever combing reality for signs of literature." But these are just signs. Assembled in this loose and largely unremarkable series of vignettes, they are not yet literature. (Oct.) The book in which these lines appear, “ Shame,” was published in 1997. (The English translation is by Tanya Leslie.) Its opening is unforgettable: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” That was in the summer of 1952, when Ernaux was eleven. It took her nearly forty-five years to try to make sense of what this terrifying event meant to her, and, by the book’s end, she is still not sure that she has. “I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” she writes. This paradoxical wish, to reveal the darkest parts of herself with such pitiless accuracy that she will be forced to fall silent once and for all, is an extraordinary expression of writerly ambition. In any case, it has still not come true. One of the key observations, which Ernaux makes in the introduction, is that for twenty years she has lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometres outside Paris. It is a “place bereft of memories”, widely spread and with undefined boundaries. A no-man’s land. This made her listen closely to the conversations on the trains and in the supermarkets. Her attempt to convey the reality of an epoch. The most interesting moments are the contempt a customer shows for a cashier, or the interactions with a man begging for money.

I realise that there are two ways of dealing with real facts. One can either relate them in detail, exposing their stark, immediate nature, outside of any narrative form, or else save them for future reference, ‘making use’ of them by incorporating them into an ensemble (a novel, for instance). Fragments of writing, like the ones in this book, arouse in me a feeling of frustration. I need to become involved in a lengthy, structured process (unaffected by chance events and meetings). Yet at the same time I have this need to record scenes glimpsed on the RER, and people’s words and gestures simply for their own sake, without any ulterior motive. Still, this way of tandem working was new for Ernaux. She has used pictures as prompts before, most notably in “ The Years” (2008), her most expansive book, a sweeping generational portrait in which she marks the passage of time by describing photographs of herself, subjecting her own image to the same frank gaze that she applied to her parents’ bodies. Here, though, she was guided by someone else’s gaze—that of Philippe, the movie’s de-facto cinematographer, who, as Ernaux dryly remarked at the New York screening, died, in 2009, “of a smoker’s cancer.” It never occurred to either of them that she would use the camera herself. Shooting was a man’s job. The book is at once lyrical and unruly. It’s a story of fleeting encounters, overheard conversations and clear-sighted observations that will make you pay attention to the seemingly ephemeral details of ordinary life.’They compared PCs and Macs, ‘memories’ and ‘programs’. We waited good-naturedly for them to abandon their off-putting lingo, which we had no desire to elucidate, and return to subjects of common exchange. They mentioned the latest cover of Charlie Hebdo and the most recent episodes of The X-Files, quoted American and Japanese films, and advised us to see Man Bites Dog and Reservoir Dogs, whose opening scene they described with relish. They laughed affectionately at our musical tastes – total crap – and offered to lend us the latest Arthur H. Our experience of the world cannot be subject to classification. In other words, the feelings and thoughts inspired by places and objects are distinct from their cultural content…a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall.”