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Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining
work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told
through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural
habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television,
advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is
subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre -
the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of
time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is
'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and
consumerism' (New York Times), a monumental account of
twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of
one woman.
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and
indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.
Blurring the line between fact and fiction, she attempts to plot
the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with
a married man where every word, event, and person either provides a
connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference.
With courage and exactitude, Ernaux seeks the truth behind an
existence lived, for a time, entirely for someone else.
Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and
a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an
attache to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion,
was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and
unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with
two grown sons, living in the suburbs of Paris and nearing fifty.
Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to
survive only in expectation of these encounters. She cannot write,
she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in
the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel
desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment
of desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.
Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her
writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Translated
brilliantly for the first time by Alison L. Strayer, Getting Lost
is a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and
despair.
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant.
Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy
will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she
cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years
later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where
abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer
the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she
finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency
ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts
through her memories and her journal entries dating from those
days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her
exams for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since
childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a
hard, practical man who showed his family little affection.
Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold
observation in A Man's Place reveals the shame that haunted her
father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he
attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him
as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and
cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up
to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world,
while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for
life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously, even reluctantly
admires.
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and
indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion.
Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator
attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year
relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and
person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject
to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks
the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and,
in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.
An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter's attachment to her
mother, and of both women's strength and resiliency. "I Remain in
Darkness" recounts Annie's attempts first to help her mother
recover from Alzheimer's disease, and then, when that proves
futile, to bear witness to the older woman's gradual decline and
her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. "I Remain
in Darkness" is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with raw
emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to
apprehend her own life's particular music.
‘My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the
early afternoon.’ Thus begins Shame, the probing story of the
twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the
traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life.
With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the analytical
eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on
experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time,
to determine the course of a life.
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Things Seen (Paperback)
Annie Ernaux; Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky; Foreword by Brian Evenson
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R417
R343
Discovery Miles 3 430
Save R74 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature “Annie Ernaux’s
work,” wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York Times,
“represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to
the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory.” In
the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison concurred: “Keen
language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to
reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse.” In this
“journal” Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in
life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where
“things seen” reflect a private life meeting the larger world.
From the war crimes tribunal in Bosnia to social issues such as
poverty and AIDS; from the state of Iraq to the world’s
contrasting reactions to Princess Diana’s death and the starkly
brutal political murders that occurred at the same time; from a
tear-gas attack on the subway to minute interactions with a clerk
in a store: Ernaux’s thought-provoking observations map the
world’s fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner
life.
In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a
student thirty years her junior – an experience that transforms
her, briefly, back into the ‘scandalous girl’ of her youth.
When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived
through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a
palimpsest on the present, the past’s immediacy pushes her to
take a decisive step in her writing – producing, in turn, the
need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man
is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory
and writing.
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining
work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told
through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural
habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television,
advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is
subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre -
the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of
time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is
'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and
consumerism' (New York Times), a monumental account of
twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of
one woman.
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The Young Man (Paperback)
Annie Ernaux; Translated by Alison Strayer
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R182
Discovery Miles 1 820
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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A fragmented and largely retrospective description of a daughter's
relationship with her father, "La Place" deals with issues of
sexuality, social sta nding and alienation. This will be an
accessible and exciting addition to French studies courses.
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A Girl's Story (Paperback)
Annie Ernaux; Translated by Alison Strayer
1
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R350
R280
Discovery Miles 2 800
Save R70 (20%)
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Ships in 5 - 10 working days
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WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE.
In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, spent working as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he moves on, she realizes she has submitted her will to his and finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, sixty years later, she finds she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman whom she wanted to forget completely.
In writing A Girl's Story, which brings to life her indelible memories of that summer, Ernaux discovers that here was the vital, violent and dolorous origin of her writing life, built out of shame, violence and betrayal.
The full French text is accompanied by French-English vocabulary.
Notes and a detailed introduction in English put the work in its
social and historical context.
La Place looks at a daughter's relationship with her father. In a
fragmented and retrospective way the narrator describes her
feelings of separation and betrayal that arise when education and
marriage place her in a social class with different values,
language, tastes and behaviour. She explores the ways in which
individual experience is related to class and group attitudes and
at the same time tells us a great deal about French society in
general since the turn of the century. It is a concentrated text,
cut through with irony and may be read in different ways. La Place
will be an accessible and exciting addition to French studies
courses.
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Jeune Homme(le)
Annie Ernaux
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R323
Discovery Miles 3 230
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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A meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate
Annie Ernaux For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has
restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy
of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns
her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a
ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention
in literature. Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris
for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its
massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge,
reinscribing the individual's role and rank within society while
absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism.
Through Ernaux's eyes, the superstore emerges as a "great human
meeting place, a spectacle," a space where we come into direct
contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate
encounters between customers; how our collective desires are
dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the
marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the
contours of gender and race in contemporary society. With her
relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of
a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences
we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.
A Frozen Woman charts Ernaux's teenage awakening, and then the
parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition
to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable
conflict between the two. And then she is thirty years old, a
teacher married to an executive, mother of two infant sons. She
looks after their nice apartment, raises her children. And yet,
like millions of other women, she has felt her enthusiasm and
curiosity, her strength and her happiness, slowly ebb under the
weight of her daily routine. The very condition that everyone
around her seems to consider normal and admirable for a woman is
killing her. While each of Ernaux's books contain an
autobiographical element, A Frozen Woman, one of Ernaux's early
works, concentrates the spotlight piercingly on Annie herself.
Mixing affection, rage and bitterness, A Frozen Woman shows us
Ernaux's developing art when she still relied on traditional
narrative, before the shortened form emerged that has since become
her trademark.
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Happening (Paperback)
Annie Ernaux; Translated by Tanya Leslie
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R351
R263
Discovery Miles 2 630
Save R88 (25%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Things Seen (Hardcover)
Annie Ernaux; Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky; Foreword by Brian Evenson
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R721
R658
Discovery Miles 6 580
Save R63 (9%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature “Annie Ernaux’s
work,” wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York Times,
“represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to
the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory.” In
the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison concurred: “Keen
language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to
reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse.” In this
“journal” Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in
life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where
“things seen” reflect a private life meeting the larger world.
From the war crimes tribunal in Bosnia to social issues such as
poverty and AIDS; from the state of Iraq to the world’s
contrasting reactions to Princess Diana’s death and the starkly
brutal political murders that occurred at the same time; from a
tear-gas attack on the subway to minute interactions with a clerk
in a store: Ernaux’s thought-provoking observations map the
world’s fleeting and lasting impressions on the shape of inner
life.
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.
Winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature Originally published
in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French
author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the
novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who
lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes place
during the summer and fall of Anne's transition from middle school
to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from
her point of view. Ernaux captures Anne's adolescent voice, through
which she expresses her keen observations in a highly colloquial
style. As the novel progresses and Anne's feelings about her
parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve, she grows
into a more mature but also more conflicted and unhappy character,
leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years. Not only
must she navigate the often-confusing signals she receives from
boys, but she also finds herself moving further and further away
from her parents as she surpasses their educational level and
worldview.
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