Annie Ernaux - Böcker

Ernaux-biblioteket: ett samlingsverk med fyra av Annie Ernaux mest älskade titlar - Min far, Kvinnan, En flickas memoarer och Skammen.

Annie Ernaux skriver om klass, kropp, kvinnoliv. Genom hela sitt författarskap har hon med knivskärpa undersökt dessa teman, vad det betyder att vara människa i de olika roller man föds in i – och möjligheten att göra sig fri från dessa. Att skriva sig fri.

I den här volymen har vi samlat fyra av Annie Ernaux böcker, som alla utgår från författarens ursprung: föräldrarnas liv, den egna uppväxten och den klassresa hon gör. Här ryms porträttet av en älskad far, en uppgörelse och försoning med en åldrande mor, den skrivande kvinnans närmande till ett våldsamt trauma från barndomen, samt hennes försök att förstå den unga flicka hon en gång var och den allra första sexuella erfarenheten med en man.

Vad innebär det att skriva sant? År 2008 ­föreslog filmskaparen Michelle Porte att hon skulle följa med författaren Annie Ernaux till platser där hon levt och verkat – Yvetot, Rouen, Cergy. Mötet gav upphov till ett samtal om livet, minnet och skrivandet, och om den oupplösliga förbindelsen dem emellan. 

I intervjuboken Den sanna platsen reflekterar Ernaux över sin klassresa, över föräldrarnas påverkan, över kvinnlig frihet, kärlek, skam och språk. Men framför allt handlar denna bok om skrivande och läsande – och om de platser som formar våra liv. 

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize-shortlisted author of The Years.

In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season 50 years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another's will and desire. In the summer of 1958, 18-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man's, and then he moves on, leaving her without a "master," bereft.

Now, 50 years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame, humiliation, and betrayal, but also in self-discovery and self-reliance, lies the origin of her writing life.

In this novel, which takes the form of journal entries made over the course of seven years, Annie Ernaux concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person's lived environment. She captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of a great city: tortured, chaotic, lyrical, and powerfully alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux's books-the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The diary of one of France's most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat.

Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered.

In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying "his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of." She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.

Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Annie Ernaux's most recent book, dazzling and breathtaking, published in France in 2022, is about her affair with a man 30 years her junior.

"A sublime book." -Olivia de Lamberterie, Elle

"Once again the work of the writer Annie Ernaux appears as both a rigorous study of life and an experiment. These fragments of living, however evanescent, are precious, irreplaceable, like a skin that never fades." -Caroline Montpetit in Le Devoir

The Young Man is Annie Ernaux's account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time- together with a sense that she is living her life backwards.

Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the "scandalous girl" she once was, but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing. It was first published in France in 2022.