A Woman's Story

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As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.

Here also, we can see Annie Ernaux going for therapeutic writing at the time of grief. We can see how Alzheimer's disease affects the stability of a family in this book. This might be a small book written in simple language. But if you try to process everything that Annie wrote in this book, we can see why it is a true masterpiece. annesinin, kendi sahip olamadıklarını kızına sunmak için çok çalışması, çabalaması, ama kızı o şeylere sahip oldukça da bir tür öfke ve kıskançlık duyması, minnet beklemesi... Ne kadar insani, ne kadar tanıdık ve aslında ne kadar "hiç öyle şey olur mu canım" diyip inkar ettiğimiz bir şey. Olur. Oluyor. İnsan olmak kusurlu bir var olma hali işte. Anneler de o kusurlardan azade değil. The subtle differences between the two worlds become even more glaring when the mother moves in with her daughter. To a house where people read Le Monde and listen to Bach. There, where Ernaux lives with her husband and two sons, new battle lines emerge for the well-rehearsed mother-daughter skirmishes. The demands Annie Ernaux makes on herself as a daughter collide painfully with the demands she makes on her mother. Again and again, she draws individual experiences to a collective, general human level. This leads her, for example, to the following beautiful conclusion: After a few years, these authors ( Alice Munro in 2013 and Olga Tokarczuk in 2018) won Nobel Prize in literature, and my friends had to agree that they couldn't at least call these books useless. I actually never recommended these books to them. They snatched my copy of these books from my possession when they heard that I loved these books. The above two experiences taught me a valuable lesson: to be careful while discussing books with my friends.

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Born into a working-class environment of pride and alcoholism, the woman of this story emerges strong-willed, ambitious, and full of human contradictions. She is Ernaux's mother, whose death after a harrowing decline into Alzheimer's disease compelled the best-selling French author to re-create her life. The result is a slender volume that, like its subject, discourages easy categorization. Ernaux describes it as a blend of literature, sociology, and history, but it is also a memoir, a tribute, and a healing exercise for the bereaved author-narrator. Ernaux's style shifts between detached, journalistic reportage and intimate self-analysis. Her poignant, personal novel may appeal more to readers of belles lettres--and of recovery literature--than to readers of popular fiction and biography. La Place , a companion work about Ernaux's father, is forthcoming from the publisher.-- Janet Ingraham, Spartan burg Cty. P.L., S.C. La scrittura della Ernaux è talmente piana e senza fronzoli da apparire quasi sciatta, quasi non fossero che appunti frettolosi in un diario. Eppure la sua efficacia e la sua precisione sono innegabili. Questo breve scritto autobiografico riesce ad avere un respiro universale pur parlando di qualcosa che più personale e intimo non può essere. E colpisce dritto al cuore. Tanto di cappello.

The author's words reveal to us why Alzheimer's disease is considered a disease affecting not just one individual but the whole family, as not just the patient, but everyone in the family has to suffer due to it. Infinitely original. A Woman’s Storyis every woman’s story. [Its] power rests not in the drama of its main event but in moments that might escape unnoticed, if not for a writer desperate to recapture every last image that her memory reluctantly yields of a lost loved one.” –New York Times Book Review The book is not just an account of the mother-daughter relationship, it is about life and death, the circle of life, the eternal truth that we must lose the ones we love, in other words, the essence of life. Does it talk about what does it mean to be alive or existing? Does a mere breathing person may be said to be alive, to exist, what does her being consist of? Doesn’t it consist of all its possessions and losses, its successes and failures, lies and truths, its dreams and realities, in other words, everything that a man is made up of? What could be said then of a woman who loses cognizance of herself, meaning of her words, her life is being dictated by imagination, with no relation to reality, she loses her being, her existence, she invents life she longer could live, as if she is a living death. But could do away with her even then, if she is our mother. Perhaps it’s hard to assuage the wounds of hearts with reason.Nothing less than a minimalist revelation, a piece of writing so spare and sharp that it cuts straight to the heart with the accuracy of a surgeon’s scalpel.” –Los Angeles Reader ve burada “yüzücüler”deki ahlakçı bakışın olmaması ayrıca hoşuma gitti. doğu ve batı kültürü arasındaki fark işte böyle de bariz. It took me a long time to realize that the feeling of unease my mother experienced in my own house was no different from what I had felt as a teenager when I was introduced to people "a cut above us." (As if only the "lower classes" suffered from inequalities which others choose to ignore.) I also realized that the cultural supremacy my husband and I enjoyed—reading Le Monde, listening to Bach—was distorted by my mother into a form of economic supremacy, based on the exploitation of labor: putting herself in the position of an employee was her way of rebelling."