A pair of glasses over the computer screen: “I guess so. Did you want it specifically? “No, I haven’t read anything about it, so we won’t be cool.” I scrolled through the shelves until I came across Empty Cabinets. “Look how lucky you are. It will be the first novel he has published and the first novel I have read about him». And the thing is, Nobel is quality, another thing is that you are more or less dependent.
Annie Ernaux was 34 when she wrote The Empty Cabinets (Gallimard, 1974; Cabaret Voltaire, 2022). In it, Denise Lesur, in first person, at the age of twenty, in college, has to face an abortion in complete solitude, a turning point in telling us her life up until that point, namely the novel. that 20-year life of the hero she. The truth is that Denise is, to some extent, a literary copy of the author himself, since most of the experiences will respond to his own life, which is why we are dealing with literature called “self-fiction.”
The novel is structured in two sequences, the first of the 8 pages where the story begins; Second of 97 pages. From the beginning, the main theme and narrative style appear. Denise has an uncultured proletarian social core, customers of her father’s bar and her mother’s grocery store, which makes her happy up to the age of 10: «I felt happy, at ease» (p.23); “Happy days” (p.41). That will change when two worlds collide when he learns what the private school he went to represents: one he wants to leave, one he feels ashamed and angry about, the other he wants to go but never sees. or she knows herself. It is the misfortune of the outcast: “I fucked everywhere” (p.19).
Its feel is perfectly reflected in its narrative style. The first person gives him extreme power in his thoughts and actions, because what the novel must be closed, conceptual and synthetic is that its use presupposes subjectivity. He describes his personal evolution in approaching culture as the only way to win, using very short sentences and a lively, direct, sharp syntax with an emphasis on simple coordination. The whole novel is a very organized and planned, continuous internal monologue through the technique of comparative confrontation: school and home; speech forms and dictionary of each group; what is learned at school and what is learned at a bar; the bell in the store versus the jingle of the bell in the school; the name they wanted at school and the “abortionist” didn’t. There are always two worlds where he learns to live between the ages of 10 and 20, trying to move away from the family and closer to the cultural one, because he will have good grades that will endure the humiliations of school. ; This will be his academic journey and entrance to university, reading letters, his escape from his origins, and his ascent to the bourgeois and cultured afterlife. For no other reason, rebellious from birth, out of anger towards his parents, for no other reason or excuse. So acquiring that culture is the main engine of his life, paradoxically, the more he has, the farther he is from his loved ones and the closer he is to being happy.
And why should you read this novel? Because besides the author being a Nobel Prize winner, which is more than enough, an author who captures his own narrative voice shows a highly defined personal style in line with his understanding of the novel as a genre. when it was published.. Also because it is a representative example of an era where the acquisition of a culture determines the social position of people and through this many lives can escape the social determinism that must always be fought.