A Girl's Story – WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE E-Book

Annie Ernaux

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

'I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her. Stop thinking that I have to write about this girl and her desire and madness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased to flow. I have never managed to do so.' In A Girl's Story, her latest book, Annie Ernaux revisits the summer of 1958, spent working as a holiday camp instructor in Normandy, and recounts the first night she spent with a man. When he moves on, she realizes she has submitted her will to his and finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, sixty years later, she finds she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman whom she wanted to forget completely. In writing A Girl's Story, which brings to life her indelible memories of that summer, Ernaux discovers that here was the vital, violent and dolorous origin of her writing life, built out of shame, violence and betrayal.

Leseprobe

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Praise for Happening

‘The experience of living simultaneously on the inside and outside of your own body is very particular to the female experience I think – and not only in relation to pregnancy but in myriad other ways too. I like the measured, unforgiving way she works her way through the logic, or illogic, of that. I find her work extraordinary.’ — Eimear McBride, The White Review

‘Universal, primeval and courageous, Happening is a fiercely dislocating, profoundly relevant work – as much of art as of human experience. It should be compulsory reading.’ — Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

‘Ernaux’s work is important. Not just because of her subject matter, but because of the way she hands it over: the subtle contradictions; her dispassionate stoicism, mixed with savagery; her detailed telling, mixed with spare, fragmented text.’ — Niamh Donnelly, Irish Times

‘One of the most powerful memoirs I have ever read.’ — Nicholas Lezard, Dhaka Tribune

‘Administers a punch beyond its slim size … An essential document of trauma which deserves to be widely read.’ — Xenobe Purvis, Review 31

‘Happening is gripping and painfully inevitable to read – like a thriller. I felt close to Annie Duchesne, in her aloneness, in a way I’ve rarely felt close to a character in a book. Women will be grateful to Ernaux for her wisdom, concision, and commitment to writing about death and life.’ — Daisy Hildyard, author of The Second Body4

Praise for The Years

‘The Years is a revolution, not only in the art of auto-biography but in art itself. Annie Ernaux’s book blends memories, dreams, facts and meditations into a unique evocation of the times in which we lived, and live.’ — John Banville, author of Mrs Osmond

‘This is an autobiography unlike any you have ever read. The Years is an earnest, fearless book, a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism, for our period of absolute commodity fetishism.’ — Edmund White, New York Times Book Review

‘I admire the form she invented, mixing autobiography, history, sociology. The anxious interrogations on her defection, moving as she did from the dominated to the dominant classes. Her loyalty to her people, her fidelity to herself. The progressive depersonalisation of her work, culminating in the disappearance of the “I” in The Years, a book I must have read three or four times since its publication, even more impressed each time by its precision, its sweep and – I can’t think of any other word – its majesty. One of the few indisputably great books of contemporary literature.’ — Emmanuel Carrère, author of The Kingdom

‘One of the best books you’ll ever read.’ — Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk

‘The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux’s work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething.’ — Édouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy5

‘Ravishing and almost oracular with insight, Ernaux’s prose performs an extraordinary dance between collective and intimate, “big” history and private experience. The Years is a philosophical meditation paced as a rollercoaster ride through the decades. How we spend ourselves too quickly, how we reach for meaning but evade it, how to live, how to remember – these are Ernaux’s themes. I am desperate for more.’ — Kapka Kassabova, author of Border

‘Annie Ernaux is long overdue to be recognised in Britain as one of the most important writers in contemporary France, and this edition of The Years ought to do the trick. Originally published there in 2008, it was immediately heralded as Ernaux’s masterpiece, her brief Remembrance of Things Past. It has been expertly rendered into English by Alison Strayer, who captures all the shadings of Ernaux’s prose, all its stops and starts, its changes in pace and in tone, its chatterings, its silences.’ — Lauren Elkin, Guardian

‘A book of memory, of a life and world, staggeringly and brilliantly original.’ — Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

‘The technique is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. She illuminates a person through the culture that poured through her; it’s about time and being situated in a certain place in history and how time and place make a person. It’s incredible.’ — Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood

‘Singular, incomparable – all the words apply.’ — Quinn Latimer, author of Like a Woman6

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A GIRL’S STORY

ANNIE ERNAUX

Translated by

ALISON L. STRAYER

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‘I know it sounds absurd

Please tell me who I am.’

— Supertramp

‘“One thing more,” she said. “I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve done. There’s nothing to be ashamed of in loving a person and saying so.”

It was not true. The shame of her surrender, her letter, her unrequited love would go on gnawing, burning, till the end of her life. (…)

After all, it did not seem to hurt much: certainly not more than could be borne in secret, without a sign. It had all been experience, and that was a salutary thing. You might write a book now, and make him one of the characters; or take up music seriously; or kill yourself.’

— Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEEPIGRAPHA GIRL’S STORY ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND TRANSLATORCOPYRIGHT

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A Girl’s Story

There are beings who are overwhelmed by the reality of others, their way of speaking, of crossing their legs, of lighting a cigarette. They become mired in the presence of others. One day, or rather one night, they are swept away inside the desire and the will of a single Other. Everything they believed about themselves vanishes. They dissolve and watch a reflection of themselves act, obey, swept into a course of events unknown. They trail behind the will of the Other, which is always one step ahead. They never catch up.

There is no submission, no consent, only the stupe­faction of the real. All one can do is repeat ‘this can’t be happening to me’ or ‘it is me this is happening to,’ but in the event, ‘me’ is no longer, has already changed. All that remains is the Other, master of the situation, of every gesture and the moment to follow, which only he foresees.

Then the Other goes away. You have ceased to inter­est him. He abandons you with the real, for example a stained pair of underwear. All he cares about is his own time now, and you are alone with your habit of obeying, already hard to shake: alone in a time bereft of a master.

And then it is child’s play for others to get around you, leap into the emptiness you are, and you refuse them nothing – you barely feel their presence. You wait for the Master to grace you with his touch, if only one more time. One night he does, with the absolute su­premacy you’ve begged him for with all your being. The next day he is gone, but little does it matter. The hope of seeing him again has become your reason for living, for putting on your clothes, improving your mind, and 12passing your exams. He’ll be back, and this time you’ll be worthy, more than worthy of him. He’ll be dazzled by the change in your beauty, your knowledge and self-assurance, compared to those of the indistinct creature you were before.

Everything you do is for the Master you have se­cretly chosen for yourself. But as you work to improve your self-worth, imperceptibly, inexorably, you leave him behind. You realize where folly has taken you, and never want to see him again. You swear to forget the whole thing and speak of it to no one.

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It was a summer with no distinguishing meteorolo-gical features, the summer of de Gaulle’s return, the new franc and the new Republic, of Pelé, football world cham­pion, of Charly Gaul, winner of the Tour de France, and Dalida’s Histoire d’un amour.

A summer as immense as they all are until one is twenty-five, when they shrink into short summers that flit by more and more quickly, their order blurred in memory until all that remains are the ones that cause a sensation, the summers of drought and blazing heat.

The summer of 1958.

As in previous summers, a small percentage of young people, the most affluent, departed with their parents for the French Riviera, while others from the same group, schooled at the lycée or the private college of Saint-Jean-Baptiste-de-la-Salle, took the boat from Dieppe to perfect their stammering English, studied for six years straight from the manual, but hardly spoken. Yet another group – schoolteachers, lycée and university students, possessed of long holidays and a little money – went off to look after children in holiday camps located all over France, in mansions, even in castles. Wherever they went, girls packed a supply of disposable sanitary towels and wondered with mingled fear and desire if this would be the summer when they’d sleep with a boy for the first time.

That summer, too, thousands of servicemen left France to restore order in Algeria. Many had never been away from home before. In dozens of letters, they wrote about the heat, the djebel, the douars – tent villages 14– and the illiterate Arabs, who after one hundred years of occupation still did not speak French. They sent pho­tos of themselves in shorts, grinning with friends in a dry and rocky landscape. They looked like boy scouts on an expedition, almost as if they were on holiday. The girls asked the boys no questions, as if the ‘engage­ments’ and ‘ambushes’ reported in the papers and on the radio involved others. They thought it was normal for the boys to perform their duty, and (as rumour had it) that they availed themselves of tethered goats to assuage their physical needs.

They came back on furlough, brought necklaces, hands of Fatima, copper trays, and then left again. They sang Le jour où la quille viendra1 to the tune of Gilbert Bécaud’s Le jour où la pluie viendra. Finally, they did re­turn to their homes all over France and were forced to make other friends, virgins of war who had not been to the bled – and never referred to fellaghas or crouil­lats2. Out of step with their surroundings, incapable of speech, they did not know if what they had done was good or bad, or whether they should feel pride or shame.

There are no photos of her from the summer of 1958.

Not even one of her eighteenth birthday, which she cel­ebrated at the camp, the youngest of all the instructors.

15Because it was her day off, she’d had time to go into town for bottles of sparkling wine, sponge fingers and Chamonix orange biscuits, but only a handful of peo­ple had stopped by her room for a drink and a snack, and quickly disappeared. Perhaps she was already con­sidered unfit company or simply uninteresting, having brought neither records nor a phonograph to camp.

Of all the people she saw each day at the camp at S, in the Orne, in the summer of ’58, does anyone remember that girl? Probably not.

They forgot her as they forgot each other when they disbanded at the end of September, returned to their ly­cées, teacher’s colleges, nursing and PE schools, or joined the squad in Algeria, most of them content to have spent their holidays in a manner both financially and morally rewarding by taking care of children. But she, no doubt, was forgotten more quickly, like an anomaly, a breach of common sense, a form of chaos or absurdity, something laughable it would be ridiculous to tax their memories with. She is absent from their memories of the summer of ’58, which today may be reduced to blurry silhouettes in a formless setting, or to the painting Negroes Fighting in a Cellar at Night, their favourite joke of the summer, along with Closed Today. (‘I passed the theatre and saw a sign for a new play, called Closed Today.’)

She has vanished from their consciousness, the in­tertwined perceptions of the others who were there that summer in the Orne. Vanished from the minds of those who assessed acts and behaviours, the seductive power of bodies, of her body; those who judged and re­jected her, shrugged their shoulders or rolled their eyes when someone said her name, itself the object of a pun 16invented by a boy who strutted about repeating, Annie what does your body say, Annie qu’est-ce que ton corps dit? (Annie Cordy the singer, ha ha!)

Permanently forgotten by the others, who have melted into French society (or society someplace else), married, divorced, or single, retired, grandparents with grey or tinted hair. Beyond recognition.

I too wanted to forget that girl. Really forget her, that is, stop yearning to write about her. Stop thinking that I have to write about this girl and her desire and mad­ness, her idiocy and pride, her hunger and her blood that ceased to flow. I have never managed to do so.

There were always references to her in my journal – ‘the girl of S’, ‘the girl of ’58’. For the last twenty years, I have jotted ‘58’ among my other book ideas. It is the perpetually missing piece, always postponed. The un­qualifiable hole.

I have never got beyond a few pages, except for one year when the calendar precisely coincided with that of 1958. On Saturday, 16 August, 2003, I began: ‘Saturday, 16 August, 1958. I bought jeans for 5,000 francs from Marie-Claude, who paid 10,000 at Elda in Rouen, and a sleeveless jersey with blue and white horizontal stripes. It is the last time I will have my body.’ I worked every day, writing quickly and trying to make the date of writ­ing match the corresponding date in 1958, the details of which I recorded pell-mell, as they came to me. It was as if this uninterrupted, daily anniversary writing were the kind best suited to purging the interval of forty-five years, as if this ‘day-for-day’ approach gave me access 17to that summer in a way as simple and direct as walking from one room to the next.

Very soon I fell behind in my recording of the facts. The stream of words and images ran riot, branching off in all directions. I was unable to seal time from the sum­mer of ’58 into my 2003 diary – it constantly burst the sluices. The further I advanced, the more I felt that I was not really writing. I could plainly see that these pages of inventory would have to change form, but how exactly I did not know. Nor did I try to find out. Deep down, I remained steeped in the pleasure of unwrapping memo­ry after memory. I refused the pain of form. After fifty pages, I stopped.

Over ten years have passed, eleven summers that raise to fifty-five the number of years that have elapsed since the summer of ’58, with wars, revolutions and explosions at nuclear power stations, all in the process of being forgotten.

The time that lies ahead of me grows shorter. There will inevitably be a last book, as there is always a last lover, a last spring, but no sign by which to know them. I am haunted by the idea that I could die without ever having written about ‘the girl of ’58’, as I very soon began to call her. Someday there will be no one left to remember. What that girl and no other experienced will remain unexplained, will have been lived for no reason.

No other writing project seems to me as – I wouldn’t say luminous, or new, and certainly not joyful, but vital: it allows me to rise above time. The thought of ‘just enjoying life’ is unbearable. Every moment lived with­out a writing project resembles the last. 18

To think I am the only one to remember, which I be­lieve to be the case, enchants me. As if I were endowed with a sovereign power, a clear superiority over the others who were there in the summer of ’58, bequeathed by the shame I felt about my desires, my insane dreams in the streets of Rouen, my blood that ceased to flow at eighteen, as if I were an old woman. I am endowed by shame’s vast memory, more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to shame.