The Young Man – WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE E-Book

Annie Ernaux

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 23

Beschreibung

In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior – an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the 'scandalous girl' of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past's immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing – producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux's relationship to time, memory and writing.

Leseprobe

Praise for Getting Lost

‘Like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, Ernaux’s affair should be counted as one of the great liaisons of literature…. I suspect the book will become a kind of totem for lovers: a manual to help them find their centre when, like Ernaux, they are lost in love. All her books have the quality of saving frail human details from oblivion. Together they tell, in fragments, the story of a woman in the twentieth century who has lived fully, sought out pain and happiness equally and then committed her findings truthfully on paper. Her life is our inheritance.’

—Ankita Chakraborty, Guardian

‘Getting Lost is a feverish book. It’s about being impaled by desire, and about the things human beings want, as opposed to the things for which they settle … it’s one of those books about loneliness that, on every page, makes you feel less alone.’

—Dwight Garner, New York Times

‘From the very first lines, we feel ourselves, like her, caught up in the vertigo of waiting, obsessed by the telephone that never rings, time that passes too quickly and the meetings that become less frequent. Love, death and literature are constantly intertwined in this story that plunges us into the intimacy of a couple, without ever giving us the impression of being voyeurs.’

—Pascale Frey, Elle

‘Ernaux has once more created a living document of existential terror and hope.’

—Catherine Taylor, Irish Times

THE YOUNG MAN

ANNIE ERNAUX

Translated by ALISON L. STRAYER

If I don’t write things down, they haven’t been carried through to completion, they have only been lived.

Contents

Title PageEpigraphThe Young ManAbout the AuthorsCopyright

Five years ago, I spent an awkward night with a student who had been writing to me for a year and wanted to meet me.

Often I have made love to force myself to write. I hoped to find in the fatigue, the dereliction that comes after, reasons not to expect anything more from life. I hoped that orgasm, the most violent end to waiting that can be, would make me feel certain that there is no greater pleasure than writing a book. Perhaps it was the desire to spark the writing of a book – a task I had hesitated to undertake because of its immensity – that prompted me to take A home for a drink after dinner at a restaurant, during which, through timidity, he had remained all but speechless. He was almost thirty years younger than me.

We saw each other on weekends, and, in between, came to miss each other more and more.