Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place.

Tanya Leslie was the first translator of Annie Ernaux into English and translated a number of her works, including A Woman’s Story (1991), A Man’s Place (1992), Simple Passion (1993), Shame (1998), I Remain in Darkness (1999) and Happening (2001). 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. But at the same time, the book takes place in France, where in 2004, Institut Montaigne estimated that there were 51 million (85%) white people of European origin. who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us. And so, through car parks, checkout queues, graffiti, the techniques of beggars, and conversations overheard on the RER (train), we are given insight into the particularities of the lives being lived around Ernaux, as well as her quest to analyse and understand life in the round.This is a completely different mode of writing than anything else I’ve read by her and is additive to her autofictive depiction across her oeuvre, perhaps essential.

In doing so, it proposes a new way of thinking about literature and photography, and the ways in which shared themes – such as class, travel, social stereotypes, and individual identity within the modern urban environment – might be explored between these two forms. So I think this is the last of the several brief memoirs or autofictions I have read and all in 2022 so far (! Nos pedaços de uma prosa simples, mas acutilante, reflecte sobre a condição urbana na contemporaneidade de uma metrópole europeia, mas também sobre a sua condição enquanto mulher e enquanto escritora.Satisfied that the things he craved will soon be his, or afraid that he might have ‘overspent’, maybe both. describing various people the French author Annie Ernaux witnessed (usually on the metro) from 1985 to 1992. I may also be trying to discover something about myself through them, their attitudes or their conversations.

in vignettes and snippet anecdotes, ernaux perfectly captures urban loneliness and absurdity, the feeling of catching a scene or eavesdropping on a private conversation that you don't have time to fully process yet still think abt from time to time. The book is broken up into years, from 1985 to 1992, but aside from that (and spaces between entries) each scene flows right into the next, like days and the various backdrops of routine. az állampolgárok egy részét lekisemberező köztársasági elnök, az anyagi jólétét spektákulummá fejlesztő szűzérmevásárló házaspár a hentesnél (a szegényebb réteg szupermarketbe jár), a hajléktalanok, a koldusok, a Saint-Lazare pályaudvar, felfüggesztve az időben, mind-mind irodalommá lényegül át. Graffiti (against colonial wars for instance) and homeless people often recur, being seen and documented by Annie Ernaux in this slim book.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. I look around the train, glancing the same old sea of faces staring at black mirrors (this is a tired description, and I’m leaving it there). As per I find Ernaux sometimes illuminating, but mostly less than impressive and at times, pretentious. In fact, I believe that these pitiful character summaries made Exteriors even stronger; they’re honest and quick, and sound like the mind, rather than some beautified version of it.

In her explicatory introduction, Ernaux professes a desire to convey pure exteriority, although she acknowledges the inevitable influence of her own preoccupations upon the “random” selection of scenes.Most of the pieces arise from rail trips between Paris and her home in Cergy-Pontoise, ""a new town 40 kilometers outside of Paris. It is a collection of journal entries written over the course of seven years (1985-1992), when she lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometers outside of Paris. Writing that is confessional, possesses the hunt for clarity, quirky observations, and wit that stays with the reader till the end.