Accordingly, there is an old prejudice. When Nobel Prize whoever decides to look for a writer is always late because he has already said everything he had to say in the best way, that is, he has passed his best days and as a result the literary production that emerges after the award will not particularly enlarge his business. Nobel’s so-called curse caught annie ernaux (Lillebonne, France, 1940), the last prominent writer with the Swedish award, with full effectiveness, A book new in bookstores French. ‘Young man’ (now in Cabaret Voltaire and Angle) is yet another piece of the puzzle with which the 82-year-old French writer is building a structure. thoughtful and profound literature It’s about the experience that makes the slogan of this fourth wave of feminists we’re in more than ever: “The personal is the political.” And yes, it is the last artifact to appear before a possible curse comes upon it.
freeze dried book
Annie Ernaux novels, basic and sharp, they often go straight to the bone, but in ‘Young Man’ it transcends itself. This is a freeze-dried book, pure essence. Almost 40 pages to describe one of your loves. Sex and its significance have been a central topic in the author’s literature, and he had to use these stories to delve deeper into his experience because, as he says in ‘El hombre joven’: “Everything will not work out if I don’t write them. Come to fruition period, I just lived them”. His highly sexualized lovers, which he uses to achieve fullness, mark his writings.”I often made love to force myself to write”, he states here. Among others, there is the ‘partner’ of one of his best novels, ‘Pure passion’, and the text ‘Disappearing’, which explores the same relationship from his diaries, the Russian diplomat ‘partner’ who is 15 years younger than him. And also, as early as the 21st century, photographer Marc Marie, 22 years younger, shared the photographic follow-up of a breast cancer that has now been overcome.
The ‘young man’ arose alongside the commission that the ‘Cahiers de L’Herne’ magazine received to dedicate to him one of its prestigious monographic issues, which often contained critical texts of experts and unpublished articles by the author in question. Ernaux found the first version of this ‘nouvelle’ among his papers. first written in 1998, recounts some events that were very close to him at the time: his affair with a young 25-year-old student at the age of 54. There was almost 30 years between them. And yes, of all the love texts, ‘Young man’ probably best expresses the true meaning of this age gap, not simply as ‘I feel rejuvenated’, but deep memory exercise. “The main problem with this novel—the author explained to France Culture radio station at the time—is that I am confronted with it, alive and dead at the same time. Alive because it was a really intense love affair and dead because it made me relive a lot of things from my past.
mirror of youth
Ernaux appreciates many of these aspects. That the relationship with the boy took place in Rouen, the city where the author himself studied philology. The original child is in financial difficulties and has a low social background, as in the case of Ernaux, the mattress is on the floor in a poorly heated student flat, which the memory of his student years and the instability of his early marriage. And once again, we find the guilt of being excluded from social classification because Ernaux, who financed the escapes of the two of them and established a “sovereign position”, felt like a “bourgeois” next to the child.
But there is more. Ernaux, mature in the late ’90s, sees from the window of his small apartment the Hospital where he was hospitalized for a week after a secret abortion as a philology student in 1964, and says these views helped him. , from trigger to memory. After a short while, already separated from the child, he will write one of his most important works, ‘The Event’.
The way Ernaux says that he has had this relationship with someone “” is also important.could be his son”; in fact, they had two children of that age at the time. The way in which, despite the difficulty, the reproach of the boy’s friends did not hide, and he sounded ridiculous from the truth of the relationship: “How do you date a woman in menopause?” The idea of motherhood and its opposite infiltrates the text unsteadily as the author imagines the wild idea of having a child again. As always, Ernaux delves into his contradictions and reaffirms—he himself says—more than any other work that his books are “a precipitate of all that matters.”