(Paris) At the age of 81, Annie Ernaux publishes her fourteenth novel, The young manand many new ones in The Notebooks of Hernemore touches to the picture of his life, before the screening of a film in Cannes.
Posted at 10:05 a.m.
In The Super-8 years, the author comments on films from the 1970s taken from her personal archives. This 1h02 feature film will be screened at the Directors’ Fortnight during the famous film festival.
The young man (Gallimard editions), published Thursday, is one more episode of the autobiographical enterprise started half a century ago.
As its last lines indicate, the story was written at the end of the 1990s, to be resumed in 2022. It narrates the affair of Annie Ernaux with a student from Rouen, some 30 years younger.
It’s a very brief dive into the last few years of the world without internet, with for example calls “from a phone booth”, or this expression that all generations will not understand without context: “A laser was already slipped into the chain (a CD, in his player).
” Density “
The essence is elsewhere, in the epilogue, which comes after about thirty pages. He explains that this story ends there, abruptly: the affair awakened memories that will lead to one of Annie Ernaux’s essential novels.
We will not know what became of this man called “A.”, “subjected to the precariousness or destitution of poor students”, and delaying his entry into the world of work. “I don’t want us to start tracking him,” said Annie Ernaux to the monthly Read.
To each of his books since Years (2008), the press says its admiration. This was not always the case, with the paroxysm of virulent criticism against the bestseller easy passion in 1992.
Le Figaro salutes this time “the rhythm of the short Ernausian form, its density, the fruit of a long work, the hammering of a reading of reality”.
For The Obsshe “succeeds in the prodigy of highlighting, with the simplicity and density of evidence, the essential aspects of an experience”.
“Let’s say it bluntly, a delight, a candy, a nod to life”, according to The Expresswhich she received in her house in Cergy in the Parisian suburbs.
La Grande Librairie on France 5 devoted an hour and a half program to him on Wednesday evening.
“A bit illegitimate”
“We whispered his name for the Nobel Prize in Literature,” said the journalist who painted his portrait. “I find that she has this stuff of a rock star,” said her colleague Nina Bouraoui.
The novelist said she still had at least one “important” episode of her life to tell. “It’s hardly a secret. Let’s say it’s a secret that concerns many women […] I’m trying right now for it to take shape, ”she said, without elaborating.
During the writing of this latest novel, Annie Ernaux also worked on the issue of the magazine The Notebooks of Herne dedicated to him. Published on Wednesday (320 pages), it is dotted with around twenty unpublished works by the author of The place.
In a diary excerpt from the summer of 1968, when she was a high school teacher at the time, she wrote, for example: “It was in passing, alive, with my eyes closed to the hideousness of my environment, that I was able to get out of it. […] I didn’t know what I wanted.”
Today, this resolute support of the party of Jean-Luc Mélenchon knows what she does not want: honors that she finds excessive.
“In the literary field, I feel a bit illegitimate, yes. I don’t know why”, she blew on the set of France 5.