Dazzling opening, then a steady pulse. Annie Ernaux spent her life looking for the right form for this book, a combination of autobiography and sociocultural history. Born in 1940 in France and reporting the years and years to the late 2010s.
By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History.
It’s a strange and bewitching mix of the personal and the political. Ernaux steps outside herself, uses she rather than !, looking at her past selves through photographs that trigger and sort memories. In her words, it works to “convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself, in History, a ‘total novel.’”
(A total novel! Connects in my head with Simenon’s “pure novel.” As well as this quote found in Badiou’s POCKET PANTHEON, regarding the Wagnerian “total work of art”: ‘Wagner’s work bequeaths his posterity an impossible task: going on with what has been completed.’)
From the horribly repressive 1950s when nobody had much of everything – and, honestly, the grim enclosure of a French rural childhood in the Fifties was surprising to me – to the 2010s when they had everything and felt like they had nothing.
Men pissed along the walls in broad daylight. Education aroused suspicion, a fear that through some obscure sanction, a punitive reversal that awaited those who tried to rise above their station, learning made you batty. Teeth were missing from every mouth. The times, people said, are not the same for everyone.
a brown stain on sheets belonging to her grandmother dead for three years, and which her mother inherited – an indelible spot which violently attracts and repels her, as if it were alive
Not having much experience of French common culture, I ended up looking up a lot of things. There was a radio show called THE CHRONICLES OF ORDINARY HATRED! There was a French version of Spitting Image called Les Guignols de l’info. These are absolutely just sidelights, but I like learning these things. Who wouldn’t want to find a radio column called THE CHRONICLES OF ORDINARY HATRED on, just before the evening news?
Television sets were turned in for newer models. The world looked more appealing on the colour display, interiors more enviable. Gone was the chilly distance of black-and-white, that severe, almost tragic negative of daily life.
But look at that. That’s perfect, that weird angle on something ordinary. This is what she does: her angles of attack on the world are entirely her own. It’s a stunning work. An experiential recording. You can touch its skin. Smell its air. It has both a ruthlessness and a richness to it, and the presence of both seems magical.
The moon, when we looked up at night, shone fixedly on billions of people, a world whose vastness and teeming activity we could feel inside. Consciousness stretched across the total space of the planet towards other galaxies. The infinite ceased to be imaginary. That is why it seemed inconceivable that one day we would die.
A necessary, awe-inspiring and recharging book.