Annie Ernaux recounts her affair with a younger man.
Annie Ernaux will have been faithful until the end to her ardent desire to write. Writing life, as she puts it so well, and not her life, even if it is through her life that she tracks down the world, translates both her genius and her aberrations. It is so, again, with The young manthe last born of the genius writer, now in her seventies, which is published by Gallimard.
Ernaux, well into his fifties, recounts his affair with a young man thirty years his junior, measures the gap between ages and that of memory, but always with the same look of truth, without excess and without complacency. “Often I have made love to force myself to write. I wanted to find in the fatigue, in the dereliction that follows, reasons to expect nothing more from life. I hoped that the end of the most violent expectation there is, that of enjoying, would make me feel certain that there was no greater enjoyment than writing a book,” she writes.
This bet, Annie Ernaux took it: in the look she casts on this couple, as well as on those who look at it. As she understands that her own age was disappearing before the face of this younger man, she writes: “Men have known this all along, I don’t see why I would have forbidden it. »
Once again, Annie Ernaux’s work as a writer appears to be a rigorous investigation of life as she experiences it. These pieces of humanity, even when they fit in 37 pages, as is the case here, are precious, irreplaceable, like a skin that would never fade. The writer herself sees it. “With him, I went through all the ages of life, my life,” she writes. But also, she notices the weight of her memory vis-à-vis this younger man, the finitude of things. “Anyway, by his very existence, he was my death. »
We do not tell Annie Ernaux, who does it so well herself. But the notebooks of L’Herne devote an entire issue, which will appear in mid-June, to the French writer, who has also largely contributed to it. It reproduces, for example, unpublished extracts from his diary, where one always finds this truth, his own, translated as closely as possible, without pretense, without artifice. There is also this beautiful text by Hélène Gestern, “We never write alone”.
“With Annie Ernaux, the first lesson was life. It could be summed up in one word: courage. Because writing a life story means going all the way. Name its trials and gaps. Expose what hurt, say how and how much. Not out of masochism, nor out of complacency: but because once pain is articulated, domesticated by writing, it is doubly defused, by the man or woman who writes it, for the woman or man who ‘recognize it,’ she wrote.
Very recently, Audrey Diwan directed the film The eventt, based on Annie Ernaux’s account of an illicit abortion in France in 1963. When it was released this year, it was said to be more relevant today than it was was when the book came out, in 2000. This book appeared just at the end of Annie Ernaux’s relationship with “the young man”. “As if I wanted to unhook it and expel it, as I had done with the embryo more than thirty years before. »
Always this life, which is born and which dies, this engine of writing, this fabric of books. Annie Ernaux writes it as an epigraph to the Young man “If I don’t write them down, things haven’t come to fruition. They have only been lived. »