Exteriors

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Ernaux's best subject is Ernaux. Her autobiographical novels like Cleaned Out, A Woman's Story, A Man's Place and Simple Passion succeeded brilliantly because Ernaux is mordantly critical of every characterespecially her own. As the title suggests, this isn't a meditation on Ernaux's inner workings but rather a writer's notebook of observations from which Ernaux herself is largely absent. Most of the pieces arise from rail trips between Paris and her home in Cergy-Pontoise, "a new town 40 kilometers outside of Paris." Ernaux's keenest insights are into the uncomfortable relationships between those who live on society's fringes and those more securely in its center. She describes a man leaning against a wall in a subway corridor: "He was not asking for money. Drawing level with him, one noticed that his fly was open, revealing his balls. An unbearable sighta shattering form of dignity." She recalls pedestrians who carefully avoid a section of pavement inscribed by an absent petitioner: "To buy food. I have no family.'' Contrasted with this is the tortured relationship between people and materialism. "I realize," she says, "that I am forever combing reality for signs of literature." But these are just signs. Assembled in this loose and largely unremarkable series of vignettes, they are not yet literature. (Oct.)

Super-M, in the Trois-Fontaines shopping centre, on a Saturday morning: a woman paces up and down the aisles of the ‘Household’ section, clutching a broom in her hands. She is muttering to herself, looking distraught: ‘Where have they gotten to? It’s not easy to get the shopping done when several people go together.’ These are some things I jotted down when I was reading the book. I can’t come close to capturing what I see and how I feel like Ernaux, but I find that I need to write something down. Endlessly stimulating author.By choosing to write in the first person, I am laying myself open to criticism, which would not have been the case had I written ‘she wondered if each man she spoke to was the one they meant.’ The third person – he/she – is always somebody else, free to do whatever they choose. ‘I’ refers to oneself, the reader, and it is inconceivable, or unthinkable, for me to read my own horoscope and behave like some mushy schoolgirl. ‘I’ shames the reader.)" Annie Ernaux reminds me of Joan Didion. Writing that is confessional, possesses the hunt for clarity, quirky observations, and wit that stays with the reader till the end. While all these technologies make it easy to keep in touch with family and friends, what I miss are the strangers. Certainly, I have not stayed in London for the weather. I am here for the crowds that spill out onto the pavement, the ladies’ pond in Hampstead Heath, the chaos of Kingsland Road—what Jane Jacobs referred to as “the ballet of the good city sidewalk.” I live in London for its strangers, for the unknown meetings that might take place. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs explained that cities “differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” Jacobs’ impassioned argument had its weaknesses, particularly its refusal to take the role of race into consideration, but she understood the importance of a density of overlapping lives. Strangers represent chance and the ephemeral. They present endless and magical possibilities.

At twenty-two, Ernaux made a vow: “If by twenty-five I haven’t fulfilled my promise of writing a novel, I’ll commit suicide.” She did write one then, but she couldn’t get it published. Even so, she chose life—or two of them. She married, had two children, and became a teacher. She had met Philippe Ernaux in Bordeaux, where he studied political science and she earned her teaching certification. “We discussed Jean-Paul Sartre and freedom, we went to see Antonioni’s ‘L’Avventura,’ we shared the same left-wing views,” Ernaux writes. But after they married, in 1964, the couple moved to Annecy for Philippe’s work and settled into a constricted domestic routine. Ernaux kept house, cooked the meals, and looked after the children while commuting to classes and grading papers—“a woman with no time to spare.” Her other life, that of a “literary being,” she hid, writing in secret to shield her work from her husband’s eyes. The triumph of Ernaux’s approach ... is to cherish commonplace emotions while elevating the banal expression of them.... A monument to passions that defy simple explanations.’Her sparse writing may suggest an aloofness, but Ernaux is in fact tuned to how non-white bodies are perceived in “fashionable” French spaces in the ‘90s: Exteriors contains the first of Ernaux’s journals to be published, and afterwards she began accumulating several different sorts of text around the main emotional events in her life. She didn’t at first think she would publish the account of her visits to her mother in the nursing home, which appeared as I Remain in Darkness, but thought again. ‘I have come round to thinking that the consistency and coherence achieved in any written work – even when its innermost contradictions are laid bare – must be questioned whenever possible.’ Ernaux often wonders aloud about the purpose of her writing: why she writes, who she’s writing for, what she hopes to achieve. In her journals, she lives a problem day to day; in her memoirs she’s able to shape reality, squash time. The image she uses elsewhere is of a horizontal line crossed at intervals by vertical ones of different lengths, like a graph. The books are vertical and the journals are horizontal, and we have access in our lives to both.