I started reading Annie Ernaux because of her recent Nobel Prize and because her translations (although I’m reading her in French) are published by a friend of mine at Seven Stories Press.
This book is typical of her short novels (which would qualify as autofiction in current terminology) in circling a topic ever more tightly until it yields the essence of its meaning. Here the event is an (illegal) abortion she had in 1963; no detail is spared, however grisly, and yet the whole of the story has a transcendent quality (although reading it now has a particular resonance, with abortion now illegal in many of the (dis)United States).
If a boa constrictor could squeeze diamonds into coal, it would feel something like reading Annie Ernaux.
"Depuis des années, je tourne autour de cet événement de ma vie. Lire dans un roman le récit d'un avortement me plonge dans un saisissement sans images ni pensées, comme si les mots se changeaient instantanément en sensation violente. De la même façon entendre par hasard La javanaise, J'ai la mémoire qui flanche, n'importe quelle chanson qui m'a accompagnée durant cette période, me bouleverse."Annie Ernaux. la couverture de l'article peut varier
I have a project to read the books my daughter left in her bedroom.
This book, suffused with beautiful imagery of the eponymous substance, is the story of an exiled Turkish poet’s return to a remote city in his homeland in quest of romantic love and artistic regeneration. He finds both, though not as expected, and during his stay, the snowbound city is briefly taken over by quasi-Islamic revolutionaries.
Snow has the gravitas of classic 19th-century Russian novels, with its realistic texture frequently interrupted by more postmodern narrative maneuvers, for a synthesis that reads like a dream haunted by history.
Detail: homes vacated by victims of the Armenian genocides that began in 1915 cast a long shadow over this story.
Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden by the government to wear their head scarves in school. But the epicentre of the suicides, the bleak, impoverished border city of Kars, is also home to the beautiful Ipek, a friend of Ka's youth whom he has never forgotten and whose spirited younger sister is a leader of the rebellious schoolgirls. As a fierce snowstorm descends, cutting them off from the world, violence between the military and local Islamic radicals begins to…
There are several Byatt titles on my daughter’s shelves, though I have read little of her work before now. Tour de Force is not too much to say; I hadn’t realized that a novel so thick with literary and mythological allusions, not to mention some very challenging philosophical, theological, and even mathematical discussions among the characters, could even be published in the 21st century.
With all that, it is never dull for a minute!
Byatt has Iris Murdoch’s unusual gift for making ideas exciting, even sexy, and an even more protean imagination, proliferating and recombining characters and storylines with a virtuoso’s verve.
Published in 2002 but set in the 1969 UK, the book offers a fascinating overlay of this time with that one.
My book began in the spirit of nobody cares what I do right now, so I will do whatever pops into my imagination.
It’s very loosely inspired by a Judith Thurman article about the Chauvet cave paintings. I wanted to do an interpenetration of the present and prehistoric past, with some kaleidoscopic alternative parallel plot lines here and there. Of course the whole thing turned in my hand and came out different.
I’m glad City Lights allowed me to call it “A Fever Dream” instead of “A Novel.”
