Exteriors

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For writers to write with vulnerability is scarier than anything I can think of right now. That is why I read poetry, as the dilemma of what it conceals or shows never ends. Our age's angsts distilled to a wrenching clarity by a writer who knows how to look—and what to look for. The book is at once lyrical and unruly. It’s a story of fleeting encounters, overheard conversations and clear-sighted observations that will make you pay attention to the seemingly ephemeral details of ordinary life.’ Exteriors" also gives us a look into Ernaux's writing process, and the way literature so completely engages her mind — something I found both enviable and amusing.

French novelist/memoirist Ernaux ( A Frozen Woman, 1995, etc.) turns conversations overheard and people and places observed into a disturbingly effective documentary record of modern life. There are many things Ernaux does well, but she is unparalleled on desire and love: the full-bodied joy, but also the brutal lows of it. Simple Passion is a sliver of a book that captures the freefall of obsessive love and the manic, mangled why-doesn’t-he-call? time shifts of an affair. Ernaux is superb on the power dynamics and inequality of some relationships. So I think this is the last of the several brief memoirs or autofictions I have read and all in 2022 so far (!) from Annie Ernaux. I read ones about her mother, her father, her early sexual life, an affair with an older, married man, an abortion, all in separate books, many based on detailed diaries she kept over the years. This one, Exteriors, is Ernaux looking more “out” on the “exterior” world. Super-M, in the Trois-Fontaines shopping centre, on a Saturday morning: a woman paces up and down the aisles of the ‘Household’ section, clutching a broom in her hands. She is muttering to herself, looking distraught: ‘Where have they gotten to? It’s not easy to get the shopping done when several people go together.’

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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. Ernaux’s journal entries were not all from the train; many different Paris destinations afforded her opportunities to talk about shops and stores and other commercial outlets, not to mention academic institutions, cathedrals, and places of entertainment. All the while the author is acutely aware that it is hard to move from general observations to the interior or statements on the broader time and age, shown by sentences like: I realize that I am forever combing reality for signs of literature.

They think I’m not legitimate,” Ernaux said to me. “What disgusts them is that there are people who have found, in literature, something that speaks to them, and that those people aren’t C.E.O.s or company bosses.” Ernaux is also the first French woman to win the Nobel, “and that doesn’t work for them, at all.” For years, she has dealt with sexist criticism of her work, and not just from the right. After she published “ Simple Passion,” a soul-baring account of a love affair with a married man, a literary critic at the liberal weekly Le Nouvel Observateur took to calling her Madame Ovary. Tonight, in the neighbourhood known as Les Linandes, a woman went by on a stretcher held by two firemen. She was propped up, almost sitting – calm, with grey hair, aged between fifty and sixty. A blanket concealed her legs and half her body. A little girl said to another, ‘there was blood on her sheet.’ But there was no sheet over the woman. She crossed the main square of Les Linandes in this fashion, a queen among people rushing to shop at Franprix and children playing, until she reached the ambulance in the car park. It was half past five, the air was crisp and cold. From the top of a building that gives onto the square, a voice yelled: ‘Rachid! Rachid!’ I put away the shopping in the boot of my car. The man who collects the trolleys was resting against the wall of the roofed-in passageway that connects the car park with the square. He was wearing a blue blazer and, as usual, grey trousers falling on to sturdy shoes. He has a striking expression. He came to retrieve my trolley when I had almost left the car park. To drive home, I took the road that runs along the gaping trench excavated to extend the RER. I felt I was riding towards the sun; it was setting beyond the criss-cross lines of pylons hurtling towards the centre of the New Town. Her sparse writing may suggest an aloofness, but Ernaux is in fact tuned to how non-white bodies are perceived in “fashionable” French spaces in the ‘90s: The book in which these lines appear, “ Shame,” was published in 1997. (The English translation is by Tanya Leslie.) Its opening is unforgettable: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” That was in the summer of 1952, when Ernaux was eleven. It took her nearly forty-five years to try to make sense of what this terrifying event meant to her, and, by the book’s end, she is still not sure that she has. “I have always wanted to write the sort of book that I find it impossible to talk about afterward, the sort of book that makes it impossible for me to withstand the gaze of others,” she writes. This paradoxical wish, to reveal the darkest parts of herself with such pitiless accuracy that she will be forced to fall silent once and for all, is an extraordinary expression of writerly ambition. In any case, it has still not come true.

Soeur Sourire is one of the many women I have never met, and with whom I might have very little in common, but who have always been close to my heart. Be they dead or alive, real people or fictional characters, they form an invisible chain of artists, women writers, literary heroines and figures from my own childhood. I feel that they embrace my own story. Her first book, Les Armoires vides ( Cleaned Out), a novel depicting her early life and her abortion, was published by Gallimard in 1974, when she was 34. Her mother died in 1986 after living with dementia for several years. While her mother was ill she had an affair with a married man; the year before her mother died, she divorced Philippe. In 2000 she retired from teaching; at last she would have the space and time to work on the book she had dreamed of for so long. But then, cancer was discovered in her breast. She wrote all the way through her treatment, recovered, and Les Années eventually came out in 2008 in France (and as The Years in the English translation by Alison Strayer, published in 2018). She became more famous still, the first living woman to have her work appear in the Gallimard Quarto series (the cooler younger sister of the Pléiade), nominated for the Man Booker International, winner of the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo. Her children had children; she had other relationships, and sometimes the men moved into the house in Cergy, which she kept in the divorce. Now in her eighties, she still lives in Cergy. Glimpses" would have been an equally worthy name, and perhaps a more truthful one as these individuals' "exteriors" often do tell us more about them, and — as the author noted above — us, than the word "exteriors" may suggest.

Go home! The man tells his dog; it slinks away, submissive, guilty. The same expressions used throughout history for children, women and dogs. At twenty-two, Ernaux made a vow: “If by twenty-five I haven’t fulfilled my promise of writing a novel, I’ll commit suicide.” She did write one then, but she couldn’t get it published. Even so, she chose life—or two of them. She married, had two children, and became a teacher. She had met Philippe Ernaux in Bordeaux, where he studied political science and she earned her teaching certification. “We discussed Jean-Paul Sartre and freedom, we went to see Antonioni’s ‘L’Avventura,’ we shared the same left-wing views,” Ernaux writes. But after they married, in 1964, the couple moved to Annecy for Philippe’s work and settled into a constricted domestic routine. Ernaux kept house, cooked the meals, and looked after the children while commuting to classes and grading papers—“a woman with no time to spare.” Her other life, that of a “literary being,” she hid, writing in secret to shield her work from her husband’s eyes. Still, this way of tandem working was new for Ernaux. She has used pictures as prompts before, most notably in “ The Years” (2008), her most expansive book, a sweeping generational portrait in which she marks the passage of time by describing photographs of herself, subjecting her own image to the same frank gaze that she applied to her parents’ bodies. Here, though, she was guided by someone else’s gaze—that of Philippe, the movie’s de-facto cinematographer, who, as Ernaux dryly remarked at the New York screening, died, in 2009, “of a smoker’s cancer.” It never occurred to either of them that she would use the camera herself. Shooting was a man’s job. What is it I am desperately seeking in reality? Is it meaning? This may sometimes, though not always be true since I have acquired the mental habit not only of experiencing emotions but of 'getting them into perspective'."anonymous figures glimpsed in the Métro or in waiting rooms . . . who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us."

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. It is a “place bereft of memories”, widely spread and with undefined boundaries. A no-man’s land. This made her listen closely to the conversations on the trains and in the supermarkets. Her attempt to convey the reality of an epoch. The most interesting moments are the contempt a customer shows for a cashier, or the interactions with a man begging for money. The triumph of Ernaux’s approach ... is to cherish commonplace emotions while elevating the banal expression of them.... A monument to passions that defy simple explanations.’ It was the death of Annie Ernaux’s father that prompted her to write memoir (her previous three books had been novels), as if the assumptions and structures of fiction crumbled when she wanted to recuperate someone she loved from the mass of history. But writing about her father in the early 1980s, more than a decade after his death, she didn’t want to make a gravestone for him, to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’. As she collected his ‘words, tastes and mannerisms’ in her writing, ‘the external evidence’ of his existence, she found herself reminiscing and then, catching herself in the act, would tear herself away from ‘the subjective point of view’. Her intention was not to commemorate or reanimate him but to discover the ‘nature and limits of the world where my father lived’. She was attempting to see him from the point of view of history and from the point of view of his daughter, to see the bones and the tombstone at once. La Place (1983), translated as A Man’s Place by Tanya Leslie in 1992, won Ernaux the Prix Renaudot and a large readership in France, but, more important, it allowed her to begin feeling out her territory. She had in mind a book she felt she couldn’t write, that was perhaps impossible to write, a book that would tell the story of France itself since 1940, the year she was born. The impossible book was impersonally personal. It would be as if the bones in the Catacombs were made to speak. I suggested to Ernaux that there might be something validating in the present outpouring of loathing. Hadn’t she been writing for years about the contempt of the rich for the poor, of men for women, of the dominant for the downtrodden? “It’s proof,” she agreed. Still, it depressed her. In the uproar, Ernaux saw a renewal of the frightening wave of outrage that had engulfed her ten years ago, when she published a column in Le Monde decrying “A Literary Elegy for Anders Breivik,” a barely concealed apologia for the Norwegian mass murderer by Richard Millet, an author and editor at Gallimard. While condemning Breivik’s crimes, Millet blamed them on multiculturalism and the erosion of European Christian identity; Ernaux called his text “a fascist pamphlet that dishonors literature.” Three days later, Millet stepped down from Gallimard’s prestigious reading committee. Many others shared Ernaux’s disgust—for instance, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Nobelled in 2008. But Ernaux’s column, counter-signed by a hundred and eighteen fellow-writers, was seized upon as a flash point. L’affaire Richard Millet became a kind of referendum on what wasn’t yet termed cancel culture, with Ernaux denounced as a harridan intent on enforcing politically correct censorship at the expense of a man’s career. “I was called a killer,” Ernaux said. She herself felt that “it was really a hallali”—a hunting call, with Ernaux as the chased stag. While all these technologies make it easy to keep in touch with family and friends, what I miss are the strangers. Certainly, I have not stayed in London for the weather. I am here for the crowds that spill out onto the pavement, the ladies’ pond in Hampstead Heath, the chaos of Kingsland Road—what Jane Jacobs referred to as “the ballet of the good city sidewalk.” I live in London for its strangers, for the unknown meetings that might take place. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs explained that cities “differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” Jacobs’ impassioned argument had its weaknesses, particularly its refusal to take the role of race into consideration, but she understood the importance of a density of overlapping lives. Strangers represent chance and the ephemeral. They present endless and magical possibilities.

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The observations by the author don’t form a narrative; they are unlinked, other than that they reveal something about the character, personality and obsessions of the writer. They are the briefest of vignettes, often observations on the train or at one or other of the various supermarkets she visits. Much of what Ernaux transmits—what it is to grow up working class in a society that is contemptuous of workers; what it is to be a woman dispossessed of her body by the laws of the state, or by the overpowering prerogatives of desire—has made her a literary model, even a hero, to those who have shared similar experiences or points of view. Ernaux’s book “ Happening,” in which she describes seeking an illegal abortion as a twenty-three-year-old student, is a feminist touchstone; it was adapted, last year, into a movie by the director Audrey Diwan. Writers like Didier Eribon, Édouard Louis, and Marie NDiaye are openly indebted to Ernaux in both substance and style. Ernaux has been asked if she is proud to have been adopted as a kind of literary godmother, or even as a spokesperson, but she feels that “pride” is the wrong word. “I never wanted to write for,” Ernaux told me. “I write from.” Still, she was moved by the joy with which readers greeted the Nobel announcement. She considered the prize “a collective” achievement. Instead, one can concentrate on how her heart sinks, how she doesn’t want to be quite so self-centered. In any case, she ends the journal entries with the understanding that just as she might be using other people as props for her stories, so do other people use her for theirs. Thus, she invites this reader to cannibalize her narrative, to see her as a symptom of Frenchness, and to comb it for everyday exclusionary practices. What mesmerizes here, as elsewhere in Ernaux’s oeuvre, is the interplay between the solipsistic intensity of the material and its documentary, disinterested, almost egoless presentation. Reminiscent of the poet Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without its Flow, a study of how grief mangles chronology, Simple Passion is a riveting investigation, in a less tragic key, into what happens to one’s experience of time in the throes of romantic obsession.’