The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the French author, Annie Ernaux, for courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory. She is the 16th French writer, the first Frenchwoman, and the 17th female author to have received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
According to the Nobel citation, Ernaux’s work La Place (A Man’s Place) meticulously mines her own memory and life experiences with ‘courage and clinical acuity’ ranging from a history of France to her first sexual experience and the shame around it, to her mother’s illness and death, to her abortion, and to her class-linked shame.
The Nobel prize in literature is worth 10 million Swedish krona (£840,000), a medal, and a certificate.
About the Novel La Place that gave Ernaux her literary breakthrough was her fourth book. The novel was published in 1984 for which she won the Prix Renaudot in France. This book is an autobiographical narrative focusing on her relationship with her father and her experiences of growing up in a small town in France, and her subsequent process of moving into adulthood and away from her parents’ place of origin.
Annie Ernaux’s father died exactly two months after she had passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Her father had grown into a hard and practical man who showed his family little affection. He was barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour. Ernaux narrates his slow ascent towards material comfort. Her cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. He gave importance 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. The story goes on till she grows up to become the uncompromising observer of the world. Her father becomes old who has a staid appreciation for life and who admires his daughter cautiously, even reluctantly.
A Man’s Place is the companion book to A Woman’s Story, a critically acclaimed memoir about Ernaux’s mother.
Her Other Works
Ernaux’s first novel was Les Armoires vides, which was published in 1974 in France, was later translated in English, in 1990, and published with the name Cleaned Out. This was her first autobiographical novel.
Ernaux’s novel A Girl’s Story, published in French in 2016, was built on her own experiences at a children’s camp. It deals with the shaming of an 18-year-old girl who is subjected to her sexuality. She looks at her own behaviour as a moral failing.
Ernaux’s historical memoir, Les Annees, originally in French, written in 2008, is considered by many as her best work. It was translated into English and published with the name The Years. In this book, she narrates about French society just after the Second World War, until 2000s. It is the story of a woman and of the evolving society she had lived in. The book won many prizes, and was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019, and won the 2019 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation.
Then came another book, Happening, which is about her illegal abortion in the 1960s. The book has been in the limelight after abortion rights were curtailed in the US. It describes the blood and mess as a commonplace for women. The book is always labelled ‘shocking’.
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