Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie)

Every year there is excited debate about what author will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and this year one of the top contenders that readers were speculating about was Annie Ernaux. Since I had a fairly free morning and while I was waiting for the prize announcement to be made, I thought I'd get to reading the most recent book to be translated by this author whose work I fell in love with starting with “The Years”. It's very short – just under 50 pages! And it centres around the subject of a married man that the author/narrator had an affair with for a couple of years. It's an all-consuming passion which takes over her life for this period of time. Her focus is not on the details or moral drama of the affair, but the impact passion has upon an individual: “I do not wish to explain my passion – that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify – but simply to describe it.” In doing so, she illuminates how we can become completely entangled in heated passion in a way that defies all logic and reason. Ernaux uses her characteristically rigorous sense of self enquiry to raise larger questions about the nature of desire, imagination, time and memory. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of Ernaux's writing is the openness of her narrative to take shape in the way which will best convey the meaning and heart of her subject matter. She describes how: “I felt I was living out my passion in the manner of a novel, but now I am not sure in which style I am writing about it, whether in the style of a testimony, or possibly even the sort of confidence that can be found in women's magazines, maybe a manifesto or a statement, or perhaps a critical commentary.” This book defies genre or any conventional form. Yet, its construction feels perfectly suited to what she wants to say and there's a masterful precision to her ideas. If most writers were to do this and discuss the book's construction so openly within the text it would feel intrusively self conscious, but with Ernaux it feels like a sincere and conscientious way to explore the subject matter. The book even moves from the past to the present tense because she realises that she's gradually being released from the grip that passion has on her which traps her in memories of her lover. At the beginning she's outside of the flow of everyday life, but by the end she's rejoined the stream of time and can reside again in the present.

It's curious how feverish passion causes us to idealize the lover. In the midst of this the lover can feel like the greatest person in the world, but afterwards we can see all too clearly that individual's flaws. Ernaux is careful not to reveal many details about the lover in order to respect his privacy and because his identity really isn't the subject of this book. We do know that he comes from a country outside France and that he doesn't even speak French that well. The fact that the narrator can't communicate that clearly with him almost seems to add to the way he's fashioned into an ideal and how nothing about their relationship is clear except the sexual desire between them: “I would only ever be certain of one thing: his desire or lack of desire. The only undeniable truth could be glimpsed by looking at his penis.” However, rather than recounting the details of their encounters, Ernaux focuses instead on the excruciating interim periods between their meetings and the force with which this passion controls her life.

This is most certainly not a saccharine or nostalgic account of a love affair. Ernaux describes passion as a destructive force which leads to pernicious thoughts and grievous actions. Not only does the passion annihilate any other pleasure she has in her life, but she longs for self destruction to reclaim that sense of closeness: “One night the thought of getting myself screened for AIDS occurred to me: 'At least he would have left me that.'” Equally disturbing is her compulsion to go “to the place where I had a clandestine abortion twenty years ago... As if hoping that this past trauma would cancel my present grief.” It was quite a shock to suddenly be taken back to the incident and physical location described in Ernaux's book “Happening”. Yet, it doesn't feel like Ernaux is justifying or judging the simultaneously exhilarating and poisonous effect that passion has upon a person's life. Rather, this text functions as a kind of testament which can be a touchstone for others who have felt such passion. The fact that Ernaux ultimately judges this passion to be “meaningless” adds to the persistent mystery of why it is a force that so feverishly grips our lives.

When I finished reading this book I went online to see that Ernaux has not won the Nobel Prize this year (the award went to the great Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah), but I hope one day she'll receive this honour.

Happening by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie)

I've been wanting to explore more of Ernaux's writing since reading her extraordinary book “The Years” last year which so creatively blended autobiographical narrative with social commentary. Her slender book “Happening” is in a similar vein but about a specific period of her history. In 1963 Ernaux was twenty three years old, single and pregnant. She desperately wanted to terminate the pregnancy because of the social shame it'd bring to her family and the limitations it'd impose on her early life. Since abortion was illegal at that time she had to resort to other means. She describes the mindset of the time: “As was often the case, you couldn't tell whether abortion was banned because it was wrong or wrong because it was banned. People judged according to the law, they didn't judge the law.” For many years she didn't discuss this period from her past, but in this book she describes her extremely difficult experiences while also meditating on the process of grappling with her memories. In this she makes a short, impactful statement about changing times and the challenges young women face in particular.

It's one thing to read about a period of history in a specific location where abortion was illegal but it's quite different to read about an individual's own experiences. Part of the reason it took her so long to write about this was that it was a subject not often discussed in society, but Ernaux maintains her conviction that “any experience, whatever its nature, has the inalienable right to be chronicled. There is no such thing as a lesser truth.” Something which makes Ernaux's story so impactful are her feelings of ambiguity about her experiences – not that she didn't make the right choice but that she's still feeling through what this incident meant in her life and she's still trying to unravel why the process of getting an abortion was so difficult. For instance, she was treated very brusquely in the hospital and she eventually understands that this is because they believed she was working class rather than a university student. As with many social taboos, the process of overcoming obstacles and avoiding the attendant feelings of shame are made more difficult for poorer and more marginalized members of society.

She marks her experiences as a definitive point of transition in her life and what I found most moving were the melancholy images which have been pressed into her memories. The daily sense of fear and gloom she felt at the time resurfaces so sharply when recalling a small exchange or a physical object from the past. She describes how “Above all I wish to capture the impression of a steady flow of unhappiness, conveyed by a pharmacist's inquisitive attitude or the sight of a hairbrush by a steaming basin of water.” This narrative seems to be a way of disentangling the continuing effects of trauma. There's a straightforward honesty to Ernaux's writing I find so refreshing because she so openly discusses her process of composing her history and subject matter while she writes it. With some other writers this might seem too self-conscious but with Ernaux it takes on a meaningful clarity. She states how “Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.” As with any great writer, she manages to do just this turning the extremely personal into something which has universal meaning.

The Years by Annie Ernaux (translated by Alison L Strayer)

When this year’s Man Booker International Prize longlist was announced it included French book “The Years” by Annie Ernaux. Some people scratched their heads at its inclusion – not because of its perceived quality – but because the English version was published in the UK by Fitzcarraldo with their recognizable plain white covers and blue lettering. This signifies it’s a book of essays or nonfiction (as opposed to their plain blue covers with white lettering which signifies it’s a work of fiction.) But the Man Booker International Prize is only open to fiction. What gives? Well, when “The Years” first appeared in its native French language it was classified as a novel. So apparently Fitzcarraldo asked the Booker if “The Years” could be submitted as a novel even though they originally classified it as nonfiction. The Booker accepted.

This titbit of gossip doesn’t matter, but it shows how the form of “The Years” doesn’t follow any neat classification. It’s part fiction, part essay, part autobiography. Personally, I don’t care how books are categorized or which shelf they sit on in a bookstore. What is important is how this revolutionary book conveys a sense of history, consciousness and national identity like no other book I’ve read before. Narrated in a unique collective “we” voice it follows a woman and those around her from post-WWII through to the current Information Age. In doing so it provides such a unique shifting sense of time as it speaks from the perspective of people in an era of rapid change. Also it regularly focuses on jarringly precise details that come close to poetry. Somehow it achieves the startling feat of being both intimately personal while also speaking as the collective voice of a generation. It’s extraordinary, beautiful and warrants prizes no matter what label it’s published under.

One of the absolutely fascinating things “The Years” does is openly discuss its protagonist’s desire to write a book and the struggle to find the right form for doing so. Normally such self-consciousness can be distracting, but in this book it’s very poignant how it captures our desire to catalogue our experiences and lives in a way which will both memorialise them and articulate their true meaning. In fact, in the later part of the book she explicitly states the mission of why she’s written the book in this way: “By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.” She does this by referencing a number of photographs taken throughout the protagonist’s life and it’s through the lens of these different stages of an individual life that she touches upon the sensibility of a generation. For instance, with a picture of the adolescent girl she devises “that writing is able to retrieve here something slipping through the 1950s, to capture the reflection that collective history projects upon the screen of individual memory.”

I also felt I could strongly relate to how she discusses the process of maturity. As we age our perception of time and our own personalities change as well. As a precocious teenager she feels: “She has gone over to the other side but she cannot say to what. The life behind her is made up of disjointed images. She feels she is nowhere, 'inside' nothing except knowledge and literature.” This beautifully captures a sense of moving from childhood to a different form of engagement with society where we become preoccupied with intellectual questions rather than just looking at the world with wonder. Later there’s an especially poignant moment where she feels her life is passing her by: “She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.” This so elegantly and tragically describes a heightened sense of self-consciousness where we see our lives like a movie or the story of a novel. And we feel that it’s being captured in some essential way, but in reality our experiences only exist on the periphery of other people’s and aren’t memorialized except in fleeting memories or photographs.

It’s so interesting how personal details are often only referred to in asides. We’re fleetingly aware the protagonist gets married, works, has children and gets divorced but these aren’t the central tenants of the plot. What this book is more concerned with is capturing the mood in stages of time and how this individual’s personality is informed by and reflects the changing society. The sense of a collective voice powerfully shows the social change and predominant ideology of a certain section of French society at different times. As she moves through the decades of the 60s and 70s there’s a growing sense of feminism and social progress. Later on there’s a critique of capitalism and material obsession in the 80s and a sense of how our relationship to world events changes with the advent of the Information Age. But there is also an expression of regressive values and xenophobia which periodically emerge in views about immigrants and Arabs. In response to acts of terrorism there are some jarring statements where its expressed “That people could murder each other over religion was beyond our comprehension. It seemed to prove that these populations had remained at an earlier stage of evolution.” Ernaux describes how these pervasive feelings of prejudice spread throughout cultures at certain times, the way in which sections of society can form elitist views and subject different cultures to a form of “otherness” which divides people in the country.

I admire how daring the author was in self-consciously plotting out the book’s structure while also creating such an enjoyable and moving reading experience. I felt I could connect with the story so powerfully though it’s so wrapped up in a time, place and people very different from my own. The novel is beautifully framed at the beginning and end with certain images which seem plucked at random but have taken on such importance for the protagonist. There are several points in the book when she recalls the memory of a woman pissing out in the open and though it was just a fleeting observation it stays with her so vividly. I love how this reflects the way we can become obsessed with certain experiences or memories which linger in our minds – not because they have any great significance but they have been defined by our point of view. They are “the images of a moment bathed in a light that is theirs alone.” This shows how it’s not the fact of events in history which resound in the collective memory but our unique perceptions of them. This is one of the many brilliant ways this novel expresses so much about personality, time and the state of being.

Now that “The Years” has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (and even though I still have three other books to read on the list) I hope Annie Ernaux wins.