When we get to the end of the book, we still do not feel like we fully know the man whose life it depicts. A Man’s Place marks its own reliance on absence by refusing to satisfy. Neither does it tell us much about Ernaux’s own life, despite the elements of autobiography. The years comprising her teacher training, her university degree and her marriage are blurred. Any emotional response to her father’s death – or even to his life – is largely absent. I have been confused with the type of relationship the author had with her father, especially in the initial part of this book. Did she actually love him or hate him? I know love is a complicated feeling that can't be explained by objective answers. Still, I felt that the author should have written that portion in a better way. I don't know whether the author was actually confused about her love towards her father due to the grief associated with her father's death or whether the central idea was lost in translation. Ernaux’s parents met at the rope factory. Then her father worked as a roofer. When he fell from a rafter, her parents looked for a business they could manage, one that didn’t require a lot of start-up money. They bought a grocery store. Because they had to grant credit, they struggled financially. Her father had to get a second job while her mother ran the business. I have read A Woman’s Story by the author previously, which was about her mother, A Man’s Place is apparently about her father. The author writes here too in that familiar unbiased and dissociated manner- a neutral manner of writing- which marks perhaps a different sort of biography or a new genre altogether. It’s like reliving memories as you do with old suppressed memories, sometimes to re-imagine them, sometimes to get away with them. At times it gets difficult to dig up old forgotten memories so we invent them, the book lies somewhere there. Or perhaps we write about it so that the eternal events such as death may be helped to get merge with the past, to be one with our past, so that our turbulent soul may find solace as then it would become like any other events of our past. The writing of the author is somewhat like a cross between family history and sociology, reality and fiction, it could be said to be an effort to delve deep inside your subconscious mind to find what lies there, a sort of unseen truth which could only be brought out to the life through something fragile but tangible such as words. Though it could not be regarded as realism as she chooses sparse, factual prose, perhaps it could be categorized as’ autofiction’. It’s taking me a long time to write. By choosing to expose the web of his life through a number of selected facts and details, I feel that I am gradually moving away from the figure of my father. The skeleton of the book takes over and ideas seem to develop of their own accord. If on the other hand I indulge in personal reminiscence, I remember him as he was, with his way of laughing and walking, taking me by the hand to the funfair. . .

Annie Ernaux: A Man’s Place review – an intimate portrait Annie Ernaux: A Man’s Place review – an intimate portrait

It is difficult to write about our loved ones after their death during the time of grief as we will have to relive our memories which will make us happy and sad at the same time. Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. A small gem of a work, and I deeply appreciate the work of Ernaux being so crisp, small in size but high in impact. You can loose yourself for a few hours in her books and have food for thought for many, many days.

A Man’s Place

The core of this short book (and most of her books are short, part of a larger memoir project) is of course about her father, begun at the occasion of his death. It is also about a time and a place, mid twentieth century France. Ernaux writes of her struggle to move out of the working-class life in which she was raised to the middle class--university, teaching primary school, marrying “well” into her husband’s middle class family, becoming an academic and a writer. Her father’s pride and sense of loss about her moving out and “up” was mirrored by her own pride and sense of loss.

La place by Annie Ernaux | Goodreads La place by Annie Ernaux | Goodreads

Her father is focussed on appearing in good standing to the community, making a success of his small grocery shop. One can already soon imagine how this leads to a divide between him and his daughter. I felt the portrayal, while being factual, to be emotional. As a reader you feel the distance between generations, how people are shaped by their upbringing and can't transcend these bounds even with those theoretically closest to them. At times I recognise the same with my father, who almost always ask me if I still have a job, himself having grown up in the eighties with hundreds of rejection letters, while I completely feel different about the subject. The Academy praised “her for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.” hiç acıklı değil, hiç duygusallaşmıyor, hiç ajitasyon yok. bakmayın ben kitabı zırıl zırıl ağlayarak bitirdiysem tamamen kişisel meselelerle ilgili. ama yazarak iyileşmek ne demek çok iyi biliyorum ve annie ernaux’yu o kadar anlıyorum ki yaşadığım duygudaşlık gözyaşı olarak fışkırıyor. araya giren iki dünya savaşı, değişen toplumsal ihtiyaçlar, bakkalların yerini alan süpermarketler, toprak zeminli müstakil evlerin yerini alan toplu konutlar… 70 sayfada daha ne anlatılabilir bilmiyorum.Her parents ran a grocery shop in rural Normandy and steadily grew into a state of material comfort: “They only really longed for things for the sake of it, because in actual fact they didn’t know what was beautiful or what people were expected to admire.” She expresses these reasons for her parents’ ignorance plainly, as though trying not to pass judgement, but she doesn’t excuse them with fondness either. proprio nel modo in cui viene vestito il corpo del padre appena morto, dopo avergli chiuso gli occhi, pur facendo presto per anticipare l’irrigidimento.

Annie Ernaux and the brutal art of memoir - New Statesman

También debo notar que las memorias nunca fueron lo mío, y esta no fue la excepción. Pero al menos las de Ernaux son muy cortas. Algunas citas interesantes aquí y allá, pero nada que vaya a quedar en la memoria, al menos para mí.

This is the first time I am reading a book that is considered therapeutic writing by the author. I think it will give readers a different reading experience compared to other memoirs. ernaux bu kitapta aşkı, meşki de atmış kenara bir yüzyılın tarihini yazmış kendince. aynı zamanda köle gibi çalışılan bir zamandan işçiliğe, sonrasında ise esnaflığa uzanan bir sınıf yolculuğu bu. The author has been able to create the detached and objective narrative about her father as we have seen in A Woman’s Story but I did not enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the account of her mother’s life, perhaps something was missing in it, the depth of emotions is probably not as much as was in A Woman’s Story since somehow, we did not feel very connected, neither with her father nor with herself. It is still a quite powerful read despite its flaws, the control Annie Ernaux has on narrative, the honesty with which she portrayed account of her father doesn’t get dismayed with guilt- another classic example of autofiction, the genre brilliantly exploited and defined by the author. He liked to sing: C'est l'aviron qui nous mène en rond – 'The paddle that is rowing us in circles'"