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Simple Passion is a brilliant yet boring example of emotional masturbation. I nearly fell asleep, so clichéd was the way in which her obsession manifested. Designed to keep a woman in her place?
Exteriors is a series of random notes of a literary suburbanite covering a seven-year period from 1985 to 1992 that never quite rises to the level of great writing. The fact that the last four years are only 14 pages in a 60-page book suggest that the writer herself was getting bored.
Shame regularly refers to shame but in fact little that she describes seems to arouse much shame. Only the last sentence about her first orgasm at 14 coming after a comment about her father’s death makes this reader wonder whether there was more to their relationship than she reveals and if that is the real source of all her shame.
Happening is somewhat about shame, too, but more as a damning portrayal of French society in the early sixties—and of the author, a self-absorbed and incredibly unaware 23 year-old. As a literary work, it would have read far better in the third person, and possibly allowed the author to dig deeper into the experience and the mind of the young woman.
So far, I’ve read 250 pages of Ernaux, paid £38 for four very skimpy books (not including shipping, twice) and I still don’t get what she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for… And none of the four are fictional, so not “literature” to me at all.
The Years is the only full-length book of the six Ernaux that I bought. Debra Levy, whom I greatly admire for Swimming Home and The Cost of Living, apparently considers this book (using the same title as one of Virginia Woolf’s last novels) “one of the best books you will ever read.” Most of the other accolades for this work are by authors I’ve never heard of (Edmund White and Margaret Drabble being the exceptions) and I disagree wholeheartedly. Ernaux herself is not that interesting to me, so her approach of framing a kind of history of her times around photographs of herself and her own life falls flat. The generalizations are somewhat true in a broad way, but often true more of France than, say, Canada or the US (which also differ from each other). I read it through without enthusiasm as I felt little in the way of insight or enchantment. I would not read it again and that’s always my barometer for whether a work is great.
A Girl’s Story is more of the same shame and what has begun to strike me as the neurotic self-consciousness of the author: her frequent musings about the process of writing, whether to write or not, etc, are not fascinating. I was unable to relate to the 18 year-old girl’s internal states, especially her strangely intense, all-encompassing, and at the same time frustrated “desire” that had nothing to do with the other person or even others, but only with her own internal hunger—again a kind of emotional jacking off. There also seems to have been a strong streak of masochism in Ernaux to have put up with so much puerile rejection, negation, verbal—and ultimately sexual—abuse.
The Young Man was the last of the six Ernaux that I read and was printed in 16 point font for all of 26 pages. Not even a novella but a longish short story. Again, the sense that she is absorbed in flashing her sex life for the world to read. If only it were interesting enough. One or two original observations about the mildly transgressive nature of the relationship were not worth the £6.99 this “book” cost.
What I understand even less after all six books is how Ernaux earned such esteem in these terribly slight and self-centered works, with their choppy writing that is self-absorbed without actually being absorbing. I can only surmise that the committee members rather liked the kind of woman that she presented. Why not Margaret Atwood, who is by far a better (more interesting, richer, more prolific, more far-ranging) writer? I can’t really see Ernaux books as literature at all. They are not much more than the diary of a neurotic woman who finds herself very fascinating.
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