Here are five major works by Annie Ernaux, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday.
The Empty Cabinets
(1974)
It is his first novel published in 1974 by Gallimard.
Inspired by real events, it recounts the abortion she underwent in 1964 while she was a student.
We find the author in the guise of Denise Lesur.
The latter is alone in her student room at the Cité Universitaire and awaits the outcome of an abortion.
Short and punchy, it recounts, in detail, this abortion felt as a failure, a form of humiliation.
Humiliation, because the young woman, promised to a brilliant future, believes she sees in this pregnancy her dream of emancipation from her native environment slipping through her fingers.
Filled with details of the act itself, the book had been called "obscene" by some critics.
From this abortion will be born another emblematic book:
The Event
.
Adapted by Audrey Diwan for the cinema, it won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 2021.
The Frozen Woman
(1981)
In
La femme gelée
(1981), Annie Ernaux continues her self-fiction work by analyzing her own life: from childhood to adulthood, from young girl full of dreams to frozen woman.
She tells what it is to be a girl, a woman, a mother in a society that she still considers patriarchal.
She recounts the discovery of social differences between women and men, the violence of this inequality.
The book also looks back on the disintegration of her marriage and her role as a wife in 1970s France.
The Square
(1983)
The book begins when Annie Ernaux is received at the Capes de Lettres Modernes.
A few weeks later, his father died.
The author
portrays him in
La Place .
She will also dedicate a book to her mother (
Une femme
).
In this book, she evokes the delicate situation linked to her change of social environment.
She is now “a class defector”.
Born into a very modest Norman family - her father was a peasant and illiterate before becoming a merchant - Annie Ernaux moved away from this environment by entering a bourgeois and intellectual sphere through her studies and her marriage.
The differences in centers of interest, preoccupations, activities, frequentations have created a gap between the father and the daughter, who no longer have much to say to each other.
The Years
(2008)
It is considered the centerpiece of his work.
She evokes her life there to trace the novel of a whole generation, that of the children of the war marked by the existentialism of the 1950s and sexual liberation.
Through the allusion to objects, words, songs, television programs, she restores a truth of her time.
“It is both the story of my life but also that of thousands of women who have also been in search of freedom and emancipation
,” she told AFP in May 2022.
Read alsoThe torch of Annie Ernaux
Daughter's Memory
(2016)
With this book, Annie Ernaux sets off in search of the "girl of 58".
This girl is her.
From the first pages of the book, like a warning, it warns the reader.
What she is about to tell him
“is the still missing text.
Always handed over.
The unspeakable hole”.
This missing text that she has been omitting for 50 years is the story of her first night, the summer of 1958, with a man.
This “left” girl who knew nothing about life and who had never left her native Normandy.
But this text is not only that of the discovery of eroticism.
It is also his first foray, brutal, into the adult world.