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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.
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 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. InΒ Happening, Ernaux sifts
through her memories and her journal entries dating from those
days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
βMy father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the
early afternoon.β 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.
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.
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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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A powerful meditation on ageing and familial love, I Remain in
Darkness recounts Annie Ernaux's attempts 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. Haunting
and devastatingly poignant, I Remain in Darkness showcases Ernaux's
unique talent for evoking life's darkest and most bewildering
episodes.
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Exteriors (Paperback)
Annie Ernaux; Translated by Tanya Leslie
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R405
R200
Discovery Miles 2 000
Save R205 (51%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her
practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated
and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, 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 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. "A Man's Place" is the companion book to her critically
acclaimed memoir about her mother, " A Woman's Story."
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