I Remain in Darkness – WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE E-Book

Annie Ernaux

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

A powerful meditation on ageing and familial love, I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie Ernaux's attempts to help her mother recover from Alzheimer's disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman's gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. Haunting and devastatingly poignant, I Remain in Darkness showcases Ernaux's unique talent for evoking life's darkest and most bewildering episodes.

Leseprobe

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 Body

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 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

‘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 Woman

I REMAIN IN DARKNESS

ANNIE ERNAUX

Translated by

TANYA LESLIE

Contents

Title Page1983 1984 1985 1986 About the Author Copyright

My mother began losing her memory and acting strangely two years after a serious road accident from which she had fully recovered – she had been knocked down by a car that had run a red light. For several months, she was able to continue living on her own in the old people’s residence of Yvetot, Normandy, where she was renting a small apartment. In the summer of 1983, in the gruelling heat, she fainted and was taken to the hospital. It was discovered that she hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for several days. Her fridge was empty except for a packet of sugar cubes. Clearly, she could no longer be left on her own.

I decided to bring her home with me to Cergy. I was convinced that the familiar surroundings and the company of my two teenage sons, Éric and David, whom she had helped me to raise, would cause her symptoms to disappear and that she would soon become the energetic, independent woman she had been up until recently.

This was not the case. Her lapses of memory got worse and the doctor mentioned the possibility of Alzheimer’s disease. She could no longer recognize the places or people she knew, like my children, my ex-husband, myself. She became a confused woman, and would nervously roam the house, or would spend hours slumped on the stairs in the corridor. In February 1984, seeing her state of prostration and her refusal to eat anything, the doctor had her taken to Pontoise Hospital. She remained there for two months, then spent some time in a private nursing home before being sent back to Pontoise and placed in the long-term geriatric ward, where she died of an embolism in April 1986, aged seventy-nine.