Exteriors: Annie Ernaux

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Thus, for me, the enjoyment of Exteriors was to have in my hands an example of a writer honing her craft. Ernaux’s observations are nothing if not exact, accurate, and faithful; they are as detailed as they are non-judgmental. But ultimately, they are moments in time, movements captured and made static by words. What would be of passing interest is if Ernaux waited a decade or two for the new town to “grow old,” and then repeated the exercise. 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. By choosing to write in the first person, I am laying myself open to criticism, which would not have been the case had I written ‘she wondered if each man she spoke to was the one they meant.’ The third person – he/she – is always somebody else, free to do whatever they choose. ‘I’ refers to oneself, the reader, and it is inconceivable, or unthinkable, for me to read my own horoscope and behave like some mushy schoolgirl. ‘I’ shames the reader.)"

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. Blanche proved to be the engine of the marriage, the dreamer and the doer. It was her idea to take over the café-grocery—she was a natural behind the counter—though this was not the end of hard times. The clientele was poor, and often asked for credit; Alphonse worked other jobs to keep the family afloat. Then there was the German Occupation to deal with, and the chaotic scramble of rationing and rebuilding that followed the war. When Annie was five, the family moved to Yvetot and took over another, more profitable café-grocery, living in the rooms upstairs. That is where Ernaux grew up: sleeping with her parents in a single bedroom, using an outdoor toilet, greeting customers with a loud, clear “ Bonjour” while watching, at Blanche’s instruction, to see that they didn’t pinch anything from the shelves. 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.’ They think I’m not legitimate,” Ernaux said to me. “What disgusts them is that there are people who have found, in literature, something that speaks to them, and that those people aren’t C.E.O.s or company bosses.” Ernaux is also the first French woman to win the Nobel, “and that doesn’t work for them, at all.” For years, she has dealt with sexist criticism of her work, and not just from the right. After she published “ Simple Passion,” a soul-baring account of a love affair with a married man, a literary critic at the liberal weekly Le Nouvel Observateur took to calling her Madame Ovary. In some of the books she tries to be almost ruthlessly unemotional, focusing on cold descriptions of events and relationships. In Exteriors she is maybe more directly reflective. Here’s a kind of similar reflection to the last quotation, a little more expanded::I devoured – not once, but twice – Fitzcarraldo’s new English edition of Simple Passion, in which the great Annie Ernaux describes the suspended animation of a love affair with a man who is not free. Every paragraph, every word, brought me closer to a state of purest yearning.’ Glimpses" would have been an equally worthy name, and perhaps a more truthful one as these individuals' "exteriors" often do tell us more about them, and — as the author noted above — us, than the word "exteriors" may suggest. One of the phrases most associated with Ernaux, “ transfuge de classe,” can seem derogatory. A “ transfuge” is a defector. But Ernaux herself uses the term, partly as an objective description of her situation as a woman who, by dint of education, rose to the middle class and then, by force of talent, to the cultural élite—and partly, it can seem, as a kind of deserved epithet that expresses her own ambivalent feelings at having moved so far from the world of her parents. In 1983, when she published “ A Man’s Place,” an account of her father’s life, she took as an epigraph a quotation by Jean Genet: “May I venture an explanation: writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed.” 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. 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.

While all these technologies make it easy to keep in touch with family and friends, what I miss are the strangers. Certainly, I have not stayed in London for the weather. I am here for the crowds that spill out onto the pavement, the ladies’ pond in Hampstead Heath, the chaos of Kingsland Road—what Jane Jacobs referred to as “the ballet of the good city sidewalk.” I live in London for its strangers, for the unknown meetings that might take place. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs explained that cities “differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” Jacobs’ impassioned argument had its weaknesses, particularly its refusal to take the role of race into consideration, but she understood the importance of a density of overlapping lives. Strangers represent chance and the ephemeral. They present endless and magical possibilities. A woman’s voice, through the loudspeaker, explains the history of April Fools’ Day. Then it announces that today there’s a special on aperitifs and hi-fi equipment. The hypermarket may want to enlighten customers and show that it can play an educational role, or else it’s a commercial ploy to lessen the onslaught of advertising. I n a few years from now, in the middle of hypermarkets, we shall probably see cinema screens, promotional lectures on painting or literature, maybe even lessons on computers. A sort of peep-show corner.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’: 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.