The end of the line (Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images)
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Think Milton Keynes, with touches of Harlow, Stevenage or Crawley. Its location in relation to the capital, though, plants the town closer to Watford, even Slough. You might just about imagine a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature growing up in a place like that. Still, for a laureate to choose such an address and then stay there willingly for almost half a century would bemuse, if not appal, the smarter sort of literary mind.
Yet Annie Ernaux, who last Thursday became the first Frenchwoman to take the literature Nobel, moved to the new town of Cergy-Pontoise — 30 kilometres north-west of central Paris — in 1975. She has remained there, in her house on a bend in the Oise, ever since. She writes all her works in Cergy: a long-settled outsider among other incomers, “in the midst of lives started elsewhere” (as she reflects in her journal Exteriors) “in Vietnam, the Maghreb, Côte d’Ivoire, the French provinces or, as was mine, in Normandy”.
After the Swedish Academy announced its choice for 2022, the reporter from Le Figaro hurried up to Cergy, put in some sterling legwork, and found the retired neighbour who looks after the author’s cat. She who told him that Ernaux stood for “Auchan” (read Tesco, maybe Asda), “the provinces, the ordinary, women”. Over in Cergy’s monumental civic centre, the Axe Majeur, the kids hanging around in the sun hadn’t heard of their illustrious fellow-citizen. But they soon began pounding their mobiles to find out about her. “At last, people are going to say something good about Cergy,” one hoped.
There’s much that’s good — or at any rate rich, complicated and interesting — to be said about Cergy-Pontoise and the other planned communities that spread across Europe in the decades after the Second World War. For the most part, however, mainstream literature, film and even journalism is not where you will find it. For sure, Ernaux — born in Normandy in 1940 to peasant-born parents who became the proprietors of a small-town café-grocery — writes in pared-down, pin-sharp prose about intimate experiences shared across classes, cultures and continents.
Since the late Seventies, her creative memoirs have pierced the veils of shame, silence and taboo to dramatise the most intimate wounds: her father’s class-bound rage (in A Man’s Place), her mother’s thwarted life and descent into Alzheimer’s (A Woman’s Story), a convulsive affair (Simple Passion), a bruising sexual initiation (A Girl’s Story), an illegal abortion (Happening). She gave shape, grace, even beauty, to the mucky froth of memory. Then, in her 2008 book The Years, she turned the stray junk of consumer culture that accumulates in everybody’s brain into material for a masterly collective autobiography of France from the war’s end to the millennium. It was like building a literary Chartres Cathedral out of ring-pulls, bottle-tops, milk cartons and fag packets.
Read some recent Anglophone tributes to Ernaux, however, and you might think that she writes the brand of abstract, disembodied auto-fiction that floats mistily above everyday existence until it comes to rest in its spiritual home: the university seminar-room. Au contraire. Just as she roots her writing in the frail, fleshly, vulnerable (female) body, so she grounds it in specific, closely-observed places. She tells stories about the events or feelings that give rise to scorn, embarrassment, even disgust. And she sets them in spaces that polite voices will (still) patronise as tacky, vulgar and soulless.
“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” cursed John Betjeman — the bard of an older, more sedate variety of suburbia — in 1937 about a boom-town that prefigured many later developments. A dozen stops up the RER line from Charles de Gaulle-Etoile, Cergy has never quite attracted Slough levels of disdain. But Ernaux’s stubborn loyalty to it reveals much about her career as an author and the fault-lines that still splinter culture in France, Britain, or elsewhere in the West. Yes, we’re talking class — though not in the way that an older generation of socially-committed writers would have conceived it.
Ernaux does not eulogise a mythological proletariat, or a persecuted underclass in the tower-block banlieue, from a safe perch in a Left Bank café or a fine converted mas on some Provençal hillside. Rather, she lives in and writes from the kind of mixed community where people come to make, or remake themselves, amid the shopping centres, the flagstoned plazas, the geometric parks and boxy housing estates of the exurban dream. At first, this new-minted townscape disoriented her, as, in the Seventies, it rapidly sprang from blueprint to building-site. She felt marooned among “the windswept esplanades, the concrete façades, pink or blue, and the empty residential avenues”. Then the people came; the supermarkets opened; the commuter trains to Paris filled. In and around Cergy she found the right stage on which to mount her exploration of “the violence and shame inherent in society”, and her quest to discover the human essence of “anything that appears to be unimportant or meaningless simply because it is familiar or ordinary”.
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SubscribeThe article depicts Annie Ernaux as a writer who pays utmost attention to the simple facts of life. The impression I receive is of a very sensitive person. All this is fine and her literary stile bodes well for readers who look for small things in life, small can be extremely beautiful and touchy.
For the same reason I find it hard to understand why a writer at this level is taking an adventurous approach in conflicts she does not know well enough in order to express an objective opinion.
I refer to her absolute condemnation of events in the Middle East. She takes sides ferociously against Israel at every possible occasion. I would expect a skilled writer to study carefully the complexity of the Middle Eastern situation before being so biased in her attitude.
It is not the first time that the Nobel Literature Commitee assign the prize to writers who have anti Israeli attitude bordering antisemitism. Another famous example is the Portuguese writer and Nobel, Jose Saramago.
A balanced approach is always the better one. As they say in Latin,’ in medio stat virtus’.
The work and the person are separate. Would I proclaim bad literature from somebody who is pro Israel? BTW, Saranago is an excellent writer.
I disagree, read “The gospel according to Jesus Christ”, highly antisemitic.
In my opinion only Blindness is a good book. Deepen a bit your knowledge about his opinions.
It’s not unusual for people who are excellent in some field to take a default public stance on something else they know little about. By “default”, I mean “whatever their peer-group espouses” and the notion that somehow Israel is just randomly attacking Palestinians and stealing their land is unfortunately the default among the intelligentsia. Similarly with economics or environmental issues, there is no deep understanding among writers and artists about the implications of what they march for.
Very well put. You hit the matter right in the head. If only people were more humble.
I had never heard of Ernaux, nor am I likely to read her but I enjoyed this generous appraisal. Having worked in Crawley a number of years ago, I remembered making a conscious decision to like the place. And lo, it became likeable.
Blimey! So now France has its own Kent? Pass the ‘ Hearl Gree and schooner of sweet sherry, Vicar!