![]() In reviews, we read Jerry Pinto’s new coming-of-age novel, a biography of George Fernandes, an anthology on the hills and more. ![]() Strayer and shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, Ernaux recalls her life from 1941 to 2006 in the ambitious book, because “all the images will disappear.” Asked which of her books would be a good starting point for people unaware of her work, she said, The Years “could bring together everyone.” Translated by Alison L. “Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean,” revealing the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are with great courage. ![]() In 1987, she wrote A Woman’s Story about her mother she would recount her parents’ life again in Shame a decade later, beginning the story with a devastating line: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” The Nobel committee, awarding her the 2022 Prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory,” says Ernaux believes in the liberating force of writing. Her literary success came with her fourth novel, A Man’s Place, in 1983, a portrait of her father. Later, Ernaux would revisit this trauma in several of her autobiographical works, Simple Passion, translated by Tanya Leslie, in 1993, in L’événement, also translated by Leslie, Happening, in 2001 or A Girl’s Story in 2016. It tells the story of 20-year-old Denise Lesur who suffers in the aftermath of an illegal abortion. She began a probe of her country background with her debut novel, Les armoires vides (1974 translated into English by Carol Sanders, Cleaned Out, 1990). Ernaux, an “ethnologist of herself”, skirts fiction and puts events of her life under the scanner. In her mostly autobiographical work, she looks closely at gender, class, language, memory, love and loss, pursuing her themes as if she is seeking the truth. A memoirist, who has written about her life in many different ways, Ernaux, born in 1940, grew up in a small town in Normandy where her parents had a grocery store and café. Last Thursday, the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced and this year it went to the French writer Annie Ernaux, who had been on the contenders’ list for years. ![]() Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. ![]()
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