A Man's Place
Book description
WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
A New York Times Notable Book
Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man…
Why read it?
2 authors picked A Man's Place as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
I read this book long before Annie Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize. It was the first of her books that I read, and I was so seized by her style of narration that I proceeded to read with devotion everything she had written.
In one of the early pages of this book, Ernaux declares that in writing about her father, she didn’t want falsity or an overblown style, no artsy attempt to produce something “’ moving’ or ‘gripping.’” The style she followed was true to the life she was describing as a working-class man with minimum education. Here is…
From Amitava's list on fathers.
What are the cultural and psychological burdens in our rapidly urbanizing world of being born a peasant?
In her spare, unflinching biography of her father, born just before 1900 in a Normandy village, Nobel Prize-winner Ernaux traces the inheritance of shame and defiance that marked her grandfather, her father, and herself, building painful barriers between the generations.
‘Peasants’ were held in contempt by society, treated as ignorant and brutish by their school teachers, derided as comic fools in movies and jokes.
If you escaped from the village to the town, as Ernaux’s father managed to do, your fear of exposure…
From Alexander's list on village lives as keys to history.
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