A Man's Place

Rating:
Summary: A touching look at a father-daughter relationship
Review: Anyone who has ever felt a distance between themselves and a parent will be moved by Ernaux's life story told in the context of her relationship to her father. The book is an account of Ernaux's childhood in a small French town where her parents owned a grocery store/diner. As Ernaux grows up and attains a higher social status, the gap widens between her father and herself. Ernaux leaves the home, gets a teaching degree and eventually has to come back when her father begins to die. Ernaux's writing is simple and direct; she never overanalyses, she simply presents what she recalls as best she can. This book has a genuine quality that renders it very moving, for everyone has regrets about the way he/she treated his/her parents, and Ernaux's attempt to repent or reconcile is easy to relate to.

Rating:
Summary: Also published under the title "Positions"
Review: Positions or A Man's Place is an account of Ernaux's father from his beginnings on a Normandy farm, his military experience, his working in a factory, marrying, raising a child, and owning a small store. In short, his was the life of a "common man", a man unwilling to put on airs for his daughter but proud of her achievements. On the otherhand he was proud of speaking French not the local patois of his parents. It is the detail Ernaux chooses that develops a picture of the man: "...but in front of educated people he would remain quite or would pause in mid-sentence, adding 'You know what I mean,' with a vague gesture of his hand, willing the other person to finish the sentence for him." A wonderful book to read to see how a character can come to life on paper.

Rating:
Summary: Also published under the title "Positions"
Review: Positions or A Man's Place is an account of Ernaux's father from his beginnings on a Normandy farm, his military experience, his working in a factory, marrying, raising a child, and owning a small store. In short, his was the life of a "common man", a man unwilling to put on airs for his daughter but proud of her achievements. On the otherhand he was proud of speaking French not the local patois of his parents. It is the detail Ernaux chooses that develops a picture of the man: "...but in front of educated people he would remain quite or would pause in mid-sentence, adding 'You know what I mean,' with a vague gesture of his hand, willing the other person to finish the sentence for him." A wonderful book to read to see how a character can come to life on paper.

Rating:
Summary: A stylistic tour de force
Review: This thin book contains a "fiction"--it is shorter than a novella, but somewhat long for a short story. Perhaps one might call it a fictionalized memoir. In experience and scope it is a novel, that is, after one has read the lean 99 pages, one feels that one has experienced an entire life, such is the effect of Ernaux's distinctive prose. She writes: "I shall collate my father's words, tastes and mannerisms, as well as the main events of his life...No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral style of writing comes to me naturally." (p. 13)

This book, and the companion volume, A Woman's Story, was a best seller in France and has become part of the national culture. What Ernaux has done and does so well is to bring to vivid reality the mundane details of the small town life of twentieth century France. Her style is deliberately "flat" without any striving for effect. There is no satire, and as she intends, no irony, no higher view; indeed the nameless first person narrator, whom the reader must take as Ernaux herself, makes no effort to romanticize any aspect of her story including the part she herself plays. She reveals herself as a creature of her culture and her class just as surely as her father was.

She is a secondary school teacher, apparently in her thirties, something of an incipient intellectual, with a two and a half year old son and a husband who also has nothing in common with her unschooled father. The story begins when her father's death at age sixty-seven goads her into recalling his life and her relationship with him. They are two people joined in blood but apart in both a social and a temporal sense. And this distance is part of what she explores. She speaks of something "indefinable," that had come between them during her adolescence, "something to do with class...Like fractured love." Perhaps we might call it the alienation of generations. He was proud of her because she was accepted by those who would not accept him. She had risen from the working class to the middle class, just as he had risen above his father's station as an illiterate peasant.

There are some intriguing curiosities. For one, the blurb identifies Ernaux as having grown up in the small town of Yvetot, while the narrative uses the quaint transparency "Y-" to identify the town, as though this were a roman a clef. For another, there is a sense of something resembling warmth between her and her father, but no more than that, and this "distance" is never really accounted for except as some inexplicable fact of life. Also, Ernaux's narrator thinks of herself as bourgeois and having risen above the station of her working class parents, yet they are totally bourgeois themselves; indeed more so that she, since they own their simple cafe and store and adjoining property in the small town, while she is the equivalent of a civil servant, her education paid for by the state so that she could be employed by the state. This ingenuous self-revelation persuades us of her honesty and guilelessness and lends a queer sort of very deep veracity to her story.

I will not call this a masterpiece, although I think all writers of fiction ought to read it for the magic of its style. She has quite a nice touch, without artificiality, without contrivance.

Tanya Leslie's translation of the French, often tested because of the large number of idioms used by Ernaux, is natural and very agreeable.


Rating:
Summary: A stylistic tour de force
Review: This thin book contains a "fiction"--it is shorter than a novella, but somewhat long for a short story. Perhaps one might call it a fictionalized memoir. In experience and scope it is a novel, that is, after one has read the lean 99 pages, one feels that one has experienced an entire life, such is the effect of Ernaux's distinctive prose. She writes: "I shall collate my father's words, tastes and mannerisms, as well as the main events of his life...No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral style of writing comes to me naturally." (p. 13)

This book, and the companion volume, A Woman's Story, was a best seller in France and has become part of the national culture. What Ernaux has done and does so well is to bring to vivid reality the mundane details of the small town life of twentieth century France. Her style is deliberately "flat" without any striving for effect. There is no satire, and as she intends, no irony, no higher view; indeed the nameless first person narrator, whom the reader must take as Ernaux herself, makes no effort to romanticize any aspect of her story including the part she herself plays. She reveals herself as a creature of her culture and her class just as surely as her father was.

She is a secondary school teacher, apparently in her thirties, something of an incipient intellectual, with a two and a half year old son and a husband who also has nothing in common with her unschooled father. The story begins when her father's death at age sixty-seven goads her into recalling his life and her relationship with him. They are two people joined in blood but apart in both a social and a temporal sense. And this distance is part of what she explores. She speaks of something "indefinable," that had come between them during her adolescence, "something to do with class...Like fractured love." Perhaps we might call it the alienation of generations. He was proud of her because she was accepted by those who would not accept him. She had risen from the working class to the middle class, just as he had risen above his father's station as an illiterate peasant.

There are some intriguing curiosities. For one, the blurb identifies Ernaux as having grown up in the small town of Yvetot, while the narrative uses the quaint transparency "Y-" to identify the town, as though this were a roman a clef. For another, there is a sense of something resembling warmth between her and her father, but no more than that, and this "distance" is never really accounted for except as some inexplicable fact of life. Also, Ernaux's narrator thinks of herself as bourgeois and having risen above the station of her working class parents, yet they are totally bourgeois themselves; indeed more so that she, since they own their simple cafe and store and adjoining property in the small town, while she is the equivalent of a civil servant, her education paid for by the state so that she could be employed by the state. This ingenuous self-revelation persuades us of her honesty and guilelessness and lends a queer sort of very deep veracity to her story.

I will not call this a masterpiece, although I think all writers of fiction ought to read it for the magic of its style. She has quite a nice touch, without artificiality, without contrivance.

Tanya Leslie's translation of the French, often tested because of the large number of idioms used by Ernaux, is natural and very agreeable.