"A Woman" by Annie Ernaux: Suddenly, the daughter of the class enemy

She always has her toiletry bag with her and panics when he's gone. She sews cloths with crooked seams together. She speaks to her own daughter with "Madame", is polite and worldly. Mostly, however, she is full of anger and mistrust. An old woman, helpless and so different, so unlike the strong, radiant woman who remembers her daughter. "I did not want her to become a little girl again, she was not allowed to." In 1986, Annie Ernaux's mother died.

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Annie Ernaux
A woman (library Suhrkamp)

Publishing company:

Suhrkamp Verlag

Pages:

88

Price:

EUR 18,00

Translated by:

Sonja Finck

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Ernaux, one of the most important authors in France, has designed a very human, very tender and sometimes heartbreaking portrait of her mother. The short text, not even 90 pages long, is a successful re-translation of the already published 1987 work in France. The author wrote it shortly after the mother's death. It is the counterpart to Ernaux's recently published book "The Place", in which she portrays the father, who, like his wife, comes from a humble background, but unlike her without much ambition. While she desperately wants to break out of the milieu of her background, through which she feels stigmatized throughout her life.

The mother, unspectacularly called "A Woman" in the title, was born in 1906 in a small town in Normandy, the fourth of six children. Her mother is a weaver, the father who dies early, a carter. At the age of twelve she leaves school and works in a margarine factory, then in a rope factory. Her dream is to have her own grocery store, which she can later realize together with her husband. And she, a "pretty, strong blonde," who is impulsive, often yelling and laughing loudly, well fed for many years.

Annie's rise leads to the rift through the family

In order for the daughter to have a better life, her mother struggles, showering Annie with toys that she herself could not have as a child. And because education also belongs to the perceived ascent, she definitely wants to make up for it. Vincent van Gogh? Does not know her, where from, but look it up in the dictionary. And you French should be flawless, without the Norman dialect of the little people.

The daughter, unlike her parents, is allowed to study, goes to high school, and finally rebels against the dominant mother, who never tires of making it clear to Annie how good she is. "Sometimes she faced the class enemy in the shape of her daughter," writes Ernaux. When she studies humanities at the university, she knows, she has his price. Her mother sells potatoes and milk from morning to night "so that I could sit in a lecture on Plato."

Later, Annie marries a student from Bordeaux, who comes from an educated home. A rift goes through the family, even more so. The eternal, deep-seated uncertainty and anxiety of the mother. She does not stop when she becomes a grandmother and looks after the grandchildren full of verve.

Annie Ernaux's book is not only a confrontation with the mother, but also with the explosive potential of social affiliation. The daughter succeeds in emancipation, but not without guilt. Similarly, it describes the young author Édouard Louis: He also has distanced himself from the working class environment of his origin. Both have expressed sympathy for the yellow-West protests, at least for their displeasure with the social division.

The French author, who also landed a bestseller in Germany in 2017 with her book "Die Jahre", describes herself as an "ethnologist of herself". The 79-year-old writes autofiktionale literature, plays with the protagonists and key scenes of her biography, haunting and unsentimental. The new book is almost sober in tone, frills and surprisingly intense. Not a word too much, no superfluous details, the literary extract of a mother-daughter relationship. Always present for the daughter, even if both women do not see each other for a long time, after all, the mother is "the only woman who seriously meant anything to me," says Ernaux.

Before Annie was born, the mother had already had a daughter. She died as a little girl of diphtheria and was henceforth a "little saint in heaven," according to the family's beliefs. In 1940 the mother gives birth to Annie. Later, the daughter will trace the life of the mother and thus, as she writes, bring the mother into the world. This belief in the magic of words - he has something comforting.