Happening – WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE E-Book

Annie Ernaux

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

Praise for Happening

‘Meticulous catalogs of longing, humiliation, class anxiety and emotional distress, Ernaux’s books are unsparing in detail, pitiless in tone. In contrast to those of so many of her confession-minded peers, her shock tactics feel principled, driven less by narcissism or the need for self-justification than by some loftier impulse: a desire to capture the past as it was, undistorted by faulty memories, moral judgments or decorative literary flourishes.’ — Emily Eakin, New York Times Book Review

‘An important, resonant work.’ — Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Years

‘The Years is a revolution, not only in the art of autobiography 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

‘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 Eddy

‘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

‘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

‘The Years is unsentimental and distant in tone, flattening out the trajectory of Ernaux’s singular life by telling a grander narrative in which the weight of history acts upon an individual life. It is not a work of autofiction but rather one of autosociobiographie, a term Ernaux coined. … The connection between In Search of Lost Time and The Years is easy to make; both works are above all preoccupied with memory and the passage of time. … It is this legacy that reverberates as Ernaux relates the story of a generation born too late to remember the widespread poverty of the war and into a world of rapidly changing technologies, sexual mores, and class distinctions.’ — Bookforum

‘Towards the end of a long life, Ernaux has gained a long and communal perspective. She reminds us that we are material beings, and that we remember in and with the body. And our communal memory makes us part of one body.’ — Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

‘Reading The Years feels like being immersed in a narrow space made of emotions, a sense of growth, and moments of striking illumination. This space is submerged below a larger, overbearing volume – historic events that feel remote but that constantly shed light on our progression.’ — Paris Review

‘The Years is a creative memoir, not only of an individual but of a generation and, indeed, an entire nation. … Beautifully presented – and surprisingly far- and deep-reaching – The Years is wonderful both as a chronicle of post-war French life (and so many of its changes) and a more universal memory-study.’ — Complete Review

Contents

Title PageEpigraphHappeningAbout the AuthorCopyright

‘I wish for two things: that happening turn to writing. And that writing be happening.’ — Michel Leiris

‘I wonder if memory is not simply a question of following things through to the end.’ — Yūko Tsushima

HAPPENING

ANNIE ERNAUX

Translated by TANYA LESLIE

 

Happening