There is a persistent prejudice: when a Nobel Prize winner decides to write again, many people suspect a late arrival, as if the writer has already spoken at their peak. The so‑called Nobel curse has followed Annie Ernaux from Lillebonne, France, born in 1940, into the present moment. A new French volume sits on bookstore shelves. Young Man, released in Paris venues Cabaret Voltaire and Angle, becomes another piece in the ongoing puzzle through which the eighty‑two year old author is assembling a structure that feels both thoughtful and deeply human. It embodies a banner of feminist thought that this era still clings to: the personal is political. It may well be the latest artifact to emerge before any looming fate ever derails it.
freeze dried book
Ernaux’s novels are known for their directness and precision, and in Young Man she transcends her usual method. The work reads like a distilled essence, almost a crystallization of a single passion into about forty pages. The focus on sex and its meaning has long driven Ernaux’s writing, and these pages use intimate scenes to probe bigger truths about desire and life. The author’s stance in Young Man is clear: without writing these experiences, they could not be known or understood. Speaking of love, he has said he often wrote to compel himself to live what he described. The cast of partners in her fiction—ranging from a key figure in a celebrated novel to others drawn from diaries—reappears here with renewed intensity. A contemporary note is added by a younger photographer who documented a cancer battle that was ultimately overcome.
Young Man appeared alongside the commission that the Cahiers de L’Herne magazine granted to dedicate a major monograph to Ernaux. This issue often gathers expert critiques and unpublished essays from the author. Ernaux uncovered the first draft of this novella among her papers; it was written in 1998 and revisits events from that period—an affair with a bright 25‑year‑old student when the author was 54, a span of roughly thirty years between them. Of all her love writings, Young Man perhaps most vividly expresses the age gap not merely as rejuvenation but as a memory exercise. The author explained to a radio program that the central tension is being alive and dead at once—alive from the intensity of the romance, dead because it forces a confrontation with past experiences.
mirror of youth
Ernaux notices many facets of this story. The relationship unfolds in Rouen, the city where she pursued studies in philology. The young man is financially challenged and comes from a modest background, echoing Ernaux’s own early years. He sleeps on a bare mattress in a frigid student flat, and the memory of those years and the instability of an early marriage surface once more. Yet a sense of social exclusion remains, as Ernaux, who helped fund escapes for the pair and asserted a position of independence, felt like a bourgeois observer beside the younger man.
There is more in the texture of the narrative. In the late 1990s Ernaux sees the world from the window of the small apartment where she wrote about a secret abortion that had occurred years earlier when she studied philology in 1964. These views—genuine triggers for memory—helped shape some of her most important work, including The Event, written after an intense personal experience.
How Ernaux presents the relationship—whether the lover could be a son—also matters. At the time, they had two children around that age. The author does not shy away from the friends’ skepticism, nor from the discomfort of public perception. The idea of motherhood and its contrary arises gently within the text, as she imagines the unlikely prospect of having a child again. As always, Ernaux allows her contradictions to surface and asserts, more than in any other work, that her books act as a capture of what truly matters to her.