My Ernaux odyssey continues with the latest republication by the UK publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. Exteriors was first published in French in 1993 and in English in 1996. It takes the form of random journal entries between 1985 and 1992. I don’t think those years have any especial significance once you know when this was first published. It was only after recording all these observations and evesdroppings that she became aware of how much of herself was included in the conversations of others. Revealing her own interest, anger or shame.

Her sparse writing may suggest an aloofness, but Ernaux is in fact tuned to how non-white bodies are perceived in “fashionable” French spaces in the ‘90s: anonymous figures glimpsed in the Métro or in waiting rooms . . . who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us." I realise that there are two ways of dealing with real facts. One can either relate them in detail, exposing their stark, immediate nature, outside of any narrative form, or else save them for future reference, ‘making use’ of them by incorporating them into an ensemble (a novel, for instance). Fragments of writing, like the ones in this book, arouse in me a feeling of frustration. I need to become involved in a lengthy, structured process (unaffected by chance events and meetings). Yet at the same time I have this need to record scenes glimpsed on the RER, and people’s words and gestures simply for their own sake, without any ulterior motive. While the world of exteriors does leave impressions on Ernaux, her focus remains her writing. She is forever searching the outside world for signs of intimacy, landing on one in the metro: “a boy and a girl and stroke each other, alternately, as if they were alone in the world. But they know that’s not true: every now and then they stare insolently at other passengers. My heart sinks. I tell myself that this is what writing is for me.” Is this what Ernaux is doing? Staring at her fellow travellers and readers insolently, while she strokes her ego? I am sure, despite her instructions, I am reading her wrong here.All this – the suffering and anxiety of waiting, the brief soulagement of lovemaking, the lethargy and fatigue that follow, the renewal of desire, the little indignities and abjections of both obsession and abandonment – Ernaux tells with calm, almost tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination, truth to self, clarity of purpose.’ Later in the narrative, Ernaux’s interest in the body takes her again to the butcher’s where she observes client-shopkeeper dynamics and how the butcher categorizes his customers: “A subconscious ritual is being played out here, celebrating the convivial symbolism of meat, gorged with blood, the family.” Naturally, eaters of halal and kosher meat are barred from this family and “the recurring bliss of Sunday lunches.” The butcher’s, alluded to in the introduction, becomes the fulcrum of Frenchness, an exclusionary space where the steaks are clearly marked for men and women. Further on, the meat takes on a more overtly religious meaning: Cergy-Pontoise is inhospitable and solitary, perhaps because it is so new and Ernaux so new to it. Aboard the 91 and 92, Elkin is forced up against the other passengers, but there is little touch in Exteriors. Only one couple kisses—and that’s at the Eglise Saint-Vincent-de-Paul in Paris. No one holds hands, apart from a tall man on the Paris-Cergy train who joins his own “quivering” pair together. On an escalator, Ernaux experiences a “fleeting impression, a light touch against [her] hip.” Turning, she finds her handbag undone (though nothing is missing) and a young man smoking a cigarette on the step behind her. As he passes, he smiles and says, “Excuse me, Madame”. Proximity can be frightful, and here it signals not community but rather alienation. The observations by the author don’t form a narrative; they are unlinked, other than that they reveal something about the character, personality and obsessions of the writer. They are the briefest of vignettes, often observations on the train or at one or other of the various supermarkets she visits. Ernaux, in particular, feels unparalleled in its harnessing of memories. An acclaimed writer in her native country, her descriptions of human life are concise and they mediate our own opinions on these encounters with our own prejudices of the world.’

What mesmerizes here, as elsewhere in Ernaux’s oeuvre, is the interplay between the solipsistic intensity of the material and its documentary, disinterested, almost egoless presentation. Reminiscent of the poet Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without its Flow, a study of how grief mangles chronology, Simple Passion is a riveting investigation, in a less tragic key, into what happens to one’s experience of time in the throes of romantic obsession.’ Sexism, economic inequality and classism; Annie Ernaux observes a lot of broader society from overheard metro conversations, from shopping in malls, by visiting galeries and observing life in general around Paris. Her first book, Les Armoires vides ( Cleaned Out), a novel depicting her early life and her abortion, was published by Gallimard in 1974, when she was 34. Her mother died in 1986 after living with dementia for several years. While her mother was ill she had an affair with a married man; the year before her mother died, she divorced Philippe. In 2000 she retired from teaching; at last she would have the space and time to work on the book she had dreamed of for so long. But then, cancer was discovered in her breast. She wrote all the way through her treatment, recovered, and Les Années eventually came out in 2008 in France (and as The Years in the English translation by Alison Strayer, published in 2018). She became more famous still, the first living woman to have her work appear in the Gallimard Quarto series (the cooler younger sister of the Pléiade), nominated for the Man Booker International, winner of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo. Her children had children; she had other relationships, and sometimes the men moved into the house in Cergy, which she kept in the divorce. Now in her eighties, she still lives in Cergy.On a wall in the covered car park at the RER station someone had written: INSANITY. Further along, on the same wall, I LOVE YOU ELSA and, in English, IF YOUR CHILDREN ARE HAPPY THEY ARE COMUNISTS. Soeur Sourire is one of the many women I have never met, and with whom I might have very little in common, but who have always been close to my heart. Be they dead or alive, real people or fictional characters, they form an invisible chain of artists, women writers, literary heroines and figures from my own childhood. I feel that they embrace my own story. Go home! The man tells his dog; it slinks away, submissive, guilty. The same expressions used throughout history for children, women and dogs. Ernaux became pregnant in October 1963, after visiting a boyfriend, P., in Bordeaux. She wrote to P. that she ‘had no intention of keeping it’. Doctors couldn’t help because they were in an impossible legal position; she then tried a leftist friend who told her about a friend, LB, who had ‘almost croaked’ during an abortion a few years earlier. The leftist friend then tried to kiss her. Needing an abortion, Ernaux discovered, made her appealing to men. She waited outside the office of the paper LB worked for, Paris-Normandie, but never caught her. She read medical journals for clues. She went to Martainville, ‘a rough, working-class area’ of Rouen, to find a doctor who did abortions, but ended up wandering aimlessly, humming ‘Dominique’, a song by Soeur Sourire that was often on the radio in 1963, a jaunty acoustic guitar-and-voice tune at odds with the despair she felt. But the voice of Soeur Sourire ‘gave me the courage to go on living that afternoon’: One of the key observations, which Ernaux makes in the introduction, is that for twenty years she has lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometres outside Paris. It is a “place bereft of memories”, widely spread and with undefined boundaries. A no-man’s land. This made her listen closely to the conversations on the trains and in the supermarkets. Her attempt to convey the reality of an epoch. The most interesting moments are the contempt a customer shows for a cashier, or the interactions with a man begging for money.

Much of what Ernaux transmits—what it is to grow up working class in a society that is contemptuous of workers; what it is to be a woman dispossessed of her body by the laws of the state, or by the overpowering prerogatives of desire—has made her a literary model, even a hero, to those who have shared similar experiences or points of view. Ernaux’s book “ Happening,” in which she describes seeking an illegal abortion as a twenty-three-year-old student, is a feminist touchstone; it was adapted, last year, into a movie by the director Audrey Diwan. Writers like Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye are openly indebted to Ernaux in both substance and style. Ernaux has been asked if she is proud to have been adopted as a kind of literary godmother, or even as a spokesperson, but she feels that “pride” is the wrong word. “I never wanted to write for,” Ernaux told me. “I write from.” Still, she was moved by the joy with which readers greeted the Nobel announcement. She considered the prize “a collective” achievement. To commute is to travel regularly, to follow the same route, and this is what Elkin—and, to a lesser extent, Ernaux—has decided or feels compelled to do. Elkin maps the 91 and 92 busses, Ernaux her new town; Exteriors, too, opens with public transit, though not on a bus but in the parking lot of an RER station. The Réseau Express Régional is the transit system that serves Paris and its suburbs. Cergy-Pontoise, where Ernaux lives, was established as a commuter’s town in the mid-1970s. The town forms the terminus (or perhaps the origin) of two RER lines. On the wall of a parking lot, Ernaux reads the graffitied “INSANITY.” That evening, she drives along the “gaping trench excavated to extend the RER,” feeling as if she is “riding towards the sun.” Our experience of the world cannot be subject to classification. In other words, the feelings and thoughts inspired by places and objects are distinct from their cultural content…a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall.” A naplószerűség 1985-től 1992-ig tartalmaz bejegyzéseket. Annie Párizs egyik új külvárosában lakik, onnan ingázik Párizsba. Ez a nyolc év az ingázásnak, a bevásárlásnak, a fodrásznál töltött időnek a történéseit örökíti meg nagyrészt, innen származik az élményanyag. Ernaux nem csak megfigyel és rögzít, ez a gyűjtemény, ahogy a könyvei nagy része (nem nyilatkozhatok mindről, még nem olvastam a teljes életművet), társadalomkritika is. Az olvasást feladatként említő fodrászlány (vö. mosás, takarítás stb.), az állampolgárok egy részét lekisemberező köztársasági elnök, az anyagi jólétét spektákulummá fejlesztő szűzérmevásárló házaspár a hentesnél (a szegényebb réteg szupermarketbe jár), a hajléktalanok, a koldusok, a Saint-Lazare pályaudvar, felfüggesztve az időben, mind-mind irodalommá lényegül át. Ernaux meg is jegyzi, hogy noha az ehhez hasonló írásfragmentumok frusztrálják, szükségét érzi rögzíteni ezeket a benyomásokat, ugyanekkor nem szűnik meg irodalmat keresni a valóságban.Pici könyv, tele szilánkokkal*. Ez az első - és egyetlen, azt hiszem -, ami nem Ernaux életét tárgyalja, noha tulajdonképpen ezek a benyomások is személyesek. Ha együtt utaztunk volna, álltunk volna sorba a hentesnél, biztosan mást vittünk volna haza élményként. Snark aside, Ernaux’s oeuvre has dealt with the consequences of trying to be “the French woman” — most notably, putting men’s desire above all and hating your own body in the process. These transgressions against the self are peppered throughout her other books that echo one another not just in content but also in the merry-go-round of their French and English titles. There is a volume entitled La Vie Exterieur (2000) published in English as Things Seen in 2010, supporting the view that Ernaux has been writing one narrative in different styles, focusing on different periods of her life. I don’t feel particularly like another woman,” Annie Ernaux said, on a recent afternoon, when she was asked what it was like to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Does winning a prize— the prize—turn you into someone else? In the minds of others it does. Although Ernaux has never been preoccupied with her Nobel odds, she has long been considered a contender by those who delight in speculating about which of the world’s writers the Swedes will crown next. Last year, at Nobel time, Ernaux left her home in the Paris suburb of Cergy for a physical-therapy appointment and found herself barraged by journalists who had camped out in front of her gate, “just in case.” The day before this year’s announcement, people at Gallimard, her French publisher, warned her not to go out or answer the phone the next morning. She obliged, even when she saw a Swedish number popping up repeatedly on her caller I.D. (“A bad joke,” she assumed. She has been hoaxed in the past.) A few minutes after one in the afternoon, she turned on the transistor radio in her kitchen and heard her own name. “It was perfectly unreal,” Ernaux said. She was alone with her cats. Super-M, in the Trois-Fontaines shopping centre, on a Saturday morning: a woman paces up and down the aisles of the ‘Household’ section, clutching a broom in her hands. She is muttering to herself, looking distraught: ‘Where have they gotten to? It’s not easy to get the shopping done when several people go together.’ Ernaux is also interested in other people’s voices and how they tell their stories. She observes a mother-daughter couple on public transport: “Clearly impressed by their own social status, they feel they have the right to share everything they do and say with the other passengers, knowing full well that they are the centre of attention.” They reveal an “[i]ntimacy of a mother-daughter relationship which they see as enviable.”

The book also has a very interesting discussion of religious feeling in France. Ernaux shares a report that suggests that the French may verbally insult God but not spit on a crucifix. It is rather refreshing to consider religion in its Christian iteration in France. Ernaux supplies an explanation: “Not because they scorn superstition but simply because they recoil at committing an act whose finality is transgression for its own sake.” However, given how much discourse has been generated around the punching down sort of humour Charlie Hebdo engages and how transgression for its own sake should be protected, I wonder if contemporary French people would agree with Ernaux on this point. Reading Ernaux, I was reminded of how the pathway to owning the surrounding around us by putting the observations in a tabloid is a very indirect way of knowing ourselves. It was the death of Annie Ernaux’s father that prompted her to write memoir (her previous three books had been novels), as if the assumptions and structures of fiction crumbled when she wanted to recuperate someone she loved from the mass of history. But writing about her father in the early 1980s, more than a decade after his death, she didn’t want to make a gravestone for him, to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’. As she collected his ‘words, tastes and mannerisms’ in her writing, ‘the external evidence’ of his existence, she found herself reminiscing and then, catching herself in the act, would tear herself away from ‘the subjective point of view’. Her intention was not to commemorate or reanimate him but to discover the ‘nature and limits of the world where my father lived’. She was attempting to see him from the point of view of history and from the point of view of his daughter, to see the bones and the tombstone at once. La Place (1983), translated as A Man’s Place by Tanya Leslie in 1992, won Ernaux the Prix Renaudot and a large readership in France, but, more important, it allowed her to begin feeling out her territory. She had in mind a book she felt she couldn’t write, that was perhaps impossible to write, a book that would tell the story of France itself since 1940, the year she was born. The impossible book was impersonally personal. It would be as if the bones in the Catacombs were made to speak. Hiába apróka a könyv, nem könnyen fogyasztható. Izgalmas, mert úgy mesél Annie Ernauxról, hogy azt a világ apró rebbenései és a krónikás ezekről alkotott benyomásai mögé rejti, azaz egyáltalán nem személytelen. Szerettem, mert más mint az autofikciói, és egy olyan életbe enged betekintést, amiről én a nyolcvanas években nem is álmodhattam.

Ernaux’s attention to France outside Paris is part of a long conversation she is having with her parents, about the ‘gulf’ she experiences between the class she grew up in and the bourgeoise she has become. Her mother wanted more for her, but sometimes saw her as a class rival; her father kept a newspaper announcement of her exam results in his wallet. She has wondered whether she writes because she can’t align those two worlds. But there is a lightness in her writing about Cergy; a delight in things and attitudes, from student graffiti in Nanterre to her publisher’s belief that all writers should have cats. The politics is in the attention she pays to ordinary things, linking her work to that of Édouard Louis and Didier Eribon as well as Flaubert and Maupassant (who wrote about the part of Normandy she is from), and also to all those, the Gilets Jaunes among them, who are fed up of hearing about the Left Bank as if it were the centre of the country, if not the world. Many people go to Ernaux for passion, relationships and the human condition, so Exteriors feels slightly out of sync with her other work. It’s no less worthy, and sees the writer step out of the often claustrophobic, interior world of her interpersonal relationships and into the outside world. Ernaux offers us a glimpse into spaces that intersect with her own life: dentist’s waiting rooms, hypermarkets, train stations, all presented as lyrical snapshots. Reading it reminds me of Natalia Ginzburg’s writing about objects, or Maeve Brennan’s encounters with public spaces in New York. These are some things I jotted down when I was reading the book. I can’t come close to capturing what I see and how I feel like Ernaux, but I find that I need to write something down. Endlessly stimulating author.