Recently I found myself in a reading slump, when my father introduced me to Annie Ernaux’s writing whose books he himself got into after meeting her irl.
So the first book I read was ‘Simple Passion’, this essay/memoir/novella call it what you want easily became one of the best things I’ve ever read. This probably arised because I felt it mirrored my own life. No I am not having any affairs with married men, but that’s the biggest reason I loved it so much. The way she portrays her feelings, her thoughts, her obsession felt so familiar yet not entirely known. The words danced through the book and the simplicity of the language with subtle poetry that comes right before a sense of very self aware humour is what made me love this book so much. I’ve never read a memoir style book but it wasn’t a complete memoir, the book starts and ends nowhere and it honestly felt like a conversation with a friend with great control over their speech.
I quickly moved onto ‘A Man’s Place’ as it was lying in my book shelf, once again I finished it in one sitting, once again I was moved by how well it was written. There were lines in this book which sounded like a more coherent version of my own thoughts. The story comes in a complete loop and in very admirable fashion explains the life of a man the reader doesn’t know. She tries to be impersonal and in many cases is also successful, but the times she isn’t is so dearly written.
And now I’ve started reading ‘The Years’ which I believe is her magnum opus if I’m not wrong, but I simply cannot seem to get into it. She uses ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ because she wants the book to feel personal to an entire generation, I personally didn’t appreciate this change and it made me lose interest quickly. For some reason there are many pointer lists in this book which makes it seem more distant to me then the ones before. I haven’t really finished, finding it hard to even want to.
by Clean_Elevator_2247