Exteriors: Annie Ernaux

Product Information

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.’”

Meditating on myth and morality. First-person and second-person in writing (the former shames the reader- she adds). Pressing on the importance of the connection between a painting and its description, Ernaux—to me it seems—wrote without fear, which is one of the most critical qualities of a writer. If Annie Ernaux were a lesser memoirist, it would be easier to lay out the bare facts of her life. She was born in Normandy in 1940, to parents who worked in factories in Lillebonne before moving to Yvetot to run a café-épicerie, but for a reader it is much easier to remember that they sold hazelnut milk chocolate but no whisky. Her parents had another daughter, Ginette, who died of diphtheria at the age of six, before Ernaux was born. Annie was sent to a private Catholic school, where she was often top of the class. She went to train as a teacher in Rouen, abandoning her studies when she realised her heart wasn’t in it. She then spent six months as an au pair in Finchley, before heading to Bordeaux to work on a PhD on Marivaux. She had an abortion when she was a student, when it was still illegal in France. At university, she met Philippe Ernaux, got married, and had two boys, Eric and David. She returned to teaching, working for 23 years at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance, a sort of French Open University. The family moved to Cergy-Pontoise, a new town on the end of the RER A, on the north-west edge of Paris. Her father died in 1967 after a short illness. She wrote while her children napped, once the teaching and housework were done.While all these technologies make it easy to keep in touch with family and friends, what I miss are the strangers. Certainly, I have not stayed in London for the weather. I am here for the crowds that spill out onto the pavement, the ladies’ pond in Hampstead Heath, the chaos of Kingsland Road—what Jane Jacobs referred to as “the ballet of the good city sidewalk.” I live in London for its strangers, for the unknown meetings that might take place. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs explained that cities “differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” Jacobs’ impassioned argument had its weaknesses, particularly its refusal to take the role of race into consideration, but she understood the importance of a density of overlapping lives. Strangers represent chance and the ephemeral. They present endless and magical possibilities. Glimpses" would have been an equally worthy name, and perhaps a more truthful one as these individuals' "exteriors" often do tell us more about them, and — as the author noted above — us, than the word "exteriors" may suggest. Again, she draws on diary entries she wrote while commuting on the Paris Métro, usually just observing strangers, and seeing how they help her reflect on her own life. Actually, she might say that the exterior life becomes her life, she uses it as a way to reflect on her own memories: 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.

The observations by the author don’t form a narrative; they are unlinked, other than that they reveal something about the character, personality and obsessions of the writer. They are the briefest of vignettes, often observations on the train or at one or other of the various supermarkets she visits. Ernaux, in particular, feels unparalleled in its harnessing of memories. An acclaimed writer in her native country, her descriptions of human life are concise and they mediate our own opinions on these encounters with our own prejudices of the world.’ The move to the new town made Ernaux a commuter, so a rich and readymade source for her sharp observations was the Réseau Express Régional, the transit system that served Paris and its suburbs. Ernaux’s journal entries were not all from the train; many different Paris destinations afforded her opportunities to talk about shops and stores and other commercial outlets, not to mention academic institutions, cathedrals, and places of entertainment.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. Blanche proved to be the engine of the marriage, the dreamer and the doer. It was her idea to take over the café-grocery—she was a natural behind the counter—though this was not the end of hard times. The clientele was poor, and often asked for credit; Alphonse worked other jobs to keep the family afloat. Then there was the German Occupation to deal with, and the chaotic scramble of rationing and rebuilding that followed the war. When Annie was five, the family moved to Yvetot and took over another, more profitable café-grocery, living in the rooms upstairs. That is where Ernaux grew up: sleeping with her parents in a single bedroom, using an outdoor toilet, greeting customers with a loud, clear “ Bonjour” while watching, at Blanche’s instruction, to see that they didn’t pinch anything from the shelves. 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.’

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. For writers to write with vulnerability is scarier than anything I can think of right now. That is why I read poetry, as the dilemma of what it conceals or shows never ends. 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. It was only after recording all these observations and evesdroppings that she became aware of how much of herself was included in the conversations of others. Revealing her own interest, anger or shame.Of all of Annie Ernaux’s books that I have read (I am about halfway through Annie Ernaux: The Unboxed Set comprising 12 books), I venture to say Exteriors might be her most self-indulgent. I say that because it seems as if she wrote this book primarily to sustain the edge of her wonderful restrained, understated style of writing. It’s sort of doing some practices, or drills. They think I’m not legitimate,” Ernaux said to me. “What disgusts them is that there are people who have found, in literature, something that speaks to them, and that those people aren’t C.E.O.s or company bosses.” Ernaux is also the first French woman to win the Nobel, “and that doesn’t work for them, at all.” For years, she has dealt with sexist criticism of her work, and not just from the right. After she published “ Simple Passion,” a soul-baring account of a love affair with a married man, a literary critic at the liberal weekly Le Nouvel Observateur took to calling her Madame Ovary. Ernaux’s attention to France outside Paris is part of a long conversation she is having with her parents, about the ‘gulf’ she experiences between the class she grew up in and the bourgeoise she has become. Her mother wanted more for her, but sometimes saw her as a class rival; her father kept a newspaper announcement of her exam results in his wallet. She has wondered whether she writes because she can’t align those two worlds. But there is a lightness in her writing about Cergy; a delight in things and attitudes, from student graffiti in Nanterre to her publisher’s belief that all writers should have cats. The politics is in the attention she pays to ordinary things, linking her work to that of Édouard Louis and Didier Eribon as well as Flaubert and Maupassant (who wrote about the part of Normandy she is from), and also to all those, the Gilets Jaunes among them, who are fed up of hearing about the Left Bank as if it were the centre of the country, if not the world. Annie Ernaux’s new book, Exteriors, is about feeling overwhelmed. 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. I say that it’s about feeling overwhelmed because, in the preface, Ernaux describes how living in “a place bereft of memories, where the buildings are scattered over a huge area, a place with undefined boundaries, proved to be an overwhelming experience.” But after that, Exteriors is void of emotion and meaning, focusing instead on the physical world — things, people, and their actions — a direct result and illustration of an overload of emotion. 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.

All this – the suffering and anxiety of waiting, the brief soulagement of lovemaking, the lethargy and fatigue that follow, the renewal of desire, the little indignities and abjections of both obsession and abandonment – Ernaux tells with calm, almost tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination, truth to self, clarity of purpose.’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.