I Will Write To Avenge My People - WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE E-Book

Annie Ernaux

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 28

Beschreibung

'I will write to avenge my people.' It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote these words in her diary, giving a name to her purpose in life as a writer. She returns to them in her stirring defence of literature and of political writing in her Nobel Lecture, delivered in Stockholm on 7 December 2022. To write of her own life, she asserts, is to 'shatter the loneliness of experiences endured and repressed'; to mine individual experience is to find collective emancipation. Ernaux's speech is a bold assertion of the capacity of writing to give people a sense of their own worth, and of one writer's commitment to bearing witness to life, its joys and its injustices.

Leseprobe

Praise for Simple Passion

‘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.’

— New York Times

‘A work of lyrical precision and diamond-hard clarity.’

— New Yorker

‘All this – the suffering and anxiety of waiting, the brief soulagement of lovemaking, the lethargy and fatigue that follow, the renewal of desire, the little indignities and abjections of both obsession and abandonment – Ernaux tells with calm, almost tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination, truth to self, clarity of purpose.’

— Washington Post

‘I devoured – not once, but twice – Fitzcarraldo’s new English edition of Simple Passion, in which the great Annie Ernaux describes the suspended animation of a love affair with a man who is not free. Every paragraph, every word, brought me closer to a state of purest yearning…’

— Rachel Cooke, Observer

‘What mesmerises 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.’

— Lola Seaton, New Statesman

Praise for A Man’s Place

‘A lesser writer would turn these experiences into misery memoirs, but Ernaux does not ask for our pity – or our admiration. It’s clear from the start that she doesn’t much care whether we like her or not, because she has no interest in herself as an individual entity. She is an emblematic daughter of emblematic French parents, part of an inevitable historical process, which includes breaking away. Her interest is in examining the breakage… Ernaux is the betrayer and her father the betrayed: this is the narrative undertow that makes A Man’s Place so lacerating.’

— Frances Wilson, Telegraph

‘Not simply a short biography of man manacled to class assumptions, this is also, ironically, an exercise in the art of unsentimental writing… The biography is also self-reflexive in its inquiry and suggests the question: what does it mean to contain a life within a number of pages?’

— Mia Colleran, Irish Times

‘Ernaux understands that writing about her parents is a form of betrayal. That she writes about their struggle to understand the middle-class literary world into which she has moved makes that betrayal all the more painful. But still she does it – and it is thrilling to read Ernaux working out, word by word, what she deems appropriate to include in each text. In being willing to show her discomfort, her disdain and her honest, careful consideration of the dilemmas of writing about real, lived lives, Ernaux has struck upon a bold new way to write memoir.’

— Ellen Peirson-Hagger, New Statesman

Praise for I Remain In Darkness

‘Acute and immediate, I Remain in Darkness is an unforgettable exploration of love, memory and the journey to loss.’

— Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing