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Overall I really like the writing style of Ernaux and the social perspective that is apparent in her writing. Without even looking, we manage to avoid one another’s bodies, barely centimetres apart in the throng. I may also be trying to discover something about myself through them, their attitudes or their conversations. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019.

Also the collapse of retail is clearly not effectuated in Ernaux her book, but can be seen sort of starting, with cashiers chatting, people to pick up trolleys being laid off and butcher visits as the heart of the social happening in the town. Yet at the same time I have this need to record scenes glimpsed on the RER, and people’s words and gestures simply for their own sake, without any ulterior motive. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive.

In this memoire Ernaux sets out to relate her observations during her daily outings on the train, in the supermarket or the mall like a series of snapshots. i absolutely loved these journal entries (which may or may not be related to the fact that i myself have been making a note of such snapshots for as long as i can remember). One of the key observations, which Ernaux makes in the introduction, is that for twenty years she has lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometres outside Paris. Of course, there’s something bleak about a new town already vandalized, but it also signifies verve and humanity. Perhaps that’s a part of the reason, but I also like to think that it just imitates reality and the way we think the closest.

In some of the books she tries to be almost ruthlessly unemotional, focusing on cold descriptions of events and relationships. It’s a masterclass in understatement, a quality difficult to find nowadays, in literature or life (this sentence being a prime example). The move to the new town made Ernaux a commuter, so a rich and readymade source for her sharp observations was the Réseau Express Régional, the transit system that served Paris and its suburbs. But at the same time, the book takes place in France, where in 2004, Institut Montaigne estimated that there were 51 million (85%) white people of European origin.Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school.

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