A Man's Place

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… show more.

A female friend who has impeccable reading taste told me she was reading Annie Ernaux’s book, Simple Passion, a diary account of Ernaux’s affair with a younger man, and that Ernaux had won the Nobel Prize.

I hadn’t heard of her but was intrigued, and found myself reading several Ernaux books this summer, including The Young Man, being the novella about the same affair with the eponymous young man. This one, though, A Man’s Place, a memoir about outgrowing Ernaux’s lower middle-class background and her relationship with her father, is particularly strong.

The prose is simple, honest,… show more.

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… show more.