July 02, 2022
00:55
Triple news for the French author who publishes with Gallimard editions “The young man”, her text both the shortest and the most powerful.
“If I don’t write them, things haven’t come to an end, they have only been experienced”, writes Annie Ernaux as an epigraph to her latest book, “The young man”a story as short as it is intense in which she looks back on her love story with a student thirty years younger than her, whose name she will not reveal…
The French author, several times cited on the lists of the Nobel Prize, finally reveals this very old love story lived largely in Rouen, the city where she herself was a student in the 1960s, when she lived the things terrible recounted in “The Event”, one of his most recognized books which has just been adapted for cinema by Audrey Diwan: “His apartment overlooked the Hôtel-Dieu, disused for a year and under construction (…) It was to this place, this hospital, that, as a student, I had been transported one night in January because of a ‘haemorrhage due to a clandestine abortion.’
Trailer “The Event”
Written largely between 1998 and 2000, “The young man” had remained unfinished, almost forgotten in the drawers of the writer. It was while compiling texts for the special issue “Annie Ernaux” of the Cahiers de l’Herne that she decided to finish it.
“Our relationship could be seen from the angle of profit. He gave me pleasure and he made me relive what I would never have imagined relive.”
Without makeup or false modesty, she details this badly dressed Norman student, his linguistic expressions, his fervor and his jealousy towards this 54-year-old lover for whom he had chosen to leave his girlfriend. Without forgetting to dissect theboth intellectual and economic ascendancy she had on him, positioning himself as the dominant “bourgeois” while he lived on candle ends, making small savings on everything – down to the baguette from the Monoprix and the portions of the Laughing Cow. The time he devoted to her was time when he was not working and when, in a way, Annie Ernaux “remunerated” him in kind, taking him on vacation or to a restaurant. Ironically: facing him, she finds herself on the other side, in the other class, that of the bourgeoisieshe who, in “La place” (Prix Renaudot 1984), described the peasant and working-class origins of her own family through the portrait of her father.
“Memory Bearer”
While with her ex-husband, years earlier, Ernaux was in the place of “the daughter of the people”, the situation is reversed with this young lover: “Our relationship could be considered from the angle of profit . He gave me pleasure and he made me relive what I never imagined relive“, she notes without shame, recognizing that, thirty years earlier, she would have turned away from him, not wanting then to find in a man the signs of her popular origins, all that she found “redneck” and that she knew had been inside her, once…
“He was the bearer of the memory of my first world. He was the incorporated past (…) With him I traveled through all the ages of life, my life.”
Through this extraordinary relationship with this broke student, necessarily frowned upon by society (“as an unnatural assembly”), it’s like she’s living her own youth for a second time, she says – and this is the strength of this book, as of all the previous ones for forty years: transcending personal experience, the simple “anecdote”, to dig, this time again, its own relationship to the time. “He was the bearer of the memory of my first world”, she wrote. “He was the incorporated past (…) With him I went through all the ages of life, my life.”
Triple news
Annie Ernaux is not one of those who likes morbid literary compilations while she is still alive… She therefore preferred to collaborate with Notebooks of the Herne to realize the beautiful issue dedicated to himcomposed of unpublished excerpts from her diary, photos, letters sent by Simone de Beauvoir, Benoîte Groult, Pierre Desproges (one of her fervent admirers), but also unpublished texts, signed Delphine de Vigan or Nicolas Mathieu .
Since the beginning of his literary career, Ernaux has been deploying a “pre-writing diary” alongside his novels, which offers his readers a rare incursion on the other side of the mirror…
Along with this publication, Gallimard has chosen to reissue its book “L’atelier noir” in the “L’imaginaire” collection, with unpublished extracts from the journal of “Mémoire de fille” (2016). Since the beginning of his literary career, Ernaux has deployed alongside his novels a “pre-write diary“, like a book of excavations, written year after year, which offers its readers a rare foray into the other side of the looking glass… Plunged into the very heart of the act of writing, we become witnesses to the author’s long dialogue with herself: thoughts carved with a knife, loose ideas, infinitives in motion; associations of words, pieces of time, confidences… A real treasure for all those who appreciate his work!
Note from L’Echo: