A Man's Place: Annie Ernaux

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It’s taking me a long time to write. By choosing to expose the web of his life through a number of selected facts and details, I feel that I am gradually moving away from the figure of my father. The skeleton of the book takes over and ideas seem to develop of their own accord. If on the other hand I indulge in personal reminiscence, I remember him as he was, with his way of laughing and walking, taking me by the hand to the funfair. . .

An unsentimental portrait of a man loved as a parent, admired as an individual but, because of habits and education, heartbreakingly apart. Moving and memorable.’ An austere but poignant account from acclaimed French writer Ernaux of those ties that bind as well as separate fathers from daughters, in this companion volume to last year's A Woman's Story. His great satisfaction, possibly even the raison d`etre of his existence, was the fact that I belonged to the world which he had scorned him. The text, released in an updated translation by Tanya Leslie, is a concise piece of autofiction: a portrait of Ernaux’s father’s life and death which stumbles, self-reflexively, at realising a complete conception of the man.The author has been able to create the detached and objective narrative about her father as we have seen in A Woman’s Story but I did not enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the account of her mother’s life, perhaps something was missing in it, the depth of emotions is probably not as much as was in A Woman’s Story since somehow, we did not feel very connected, neither with her father nor with herself. It is still a quite powerful read despite its flaws, the control Annie Ernaux has on narrative, the honesty with which she portrayed account of her father doesn’t get dismayed with guilt- another classic example of autofiction, the genre brilliantly exploited and defined by the author.

In distinguished society, grief at the loss of a loved one is expressed through tears, silence and dignity. The social conventions observed by my mother, and for that matter the rest of the neighborhood, had nothing to do with dignity." This is the first time I am reading a book that is considered therapeutic writing by the author. I think it will give readers a different reading experience compared to other memoirs. Raised in near poverty, Ernaux’s father became very conscious of class. His father took him out of school at age 12 to work on the same farm where he was working. urn:lcp:mansplace000erna:epub:a0cf6293-9e7a-430e-b697-efb546533c5a Foldoutcount 0 Identifier mansplace000erna Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t75t4xx29 Isbn 9780345378958 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 Placeso lacerating.’pg 13 - This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally. It was the same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news. A book written by an author about her father after his death will always be an emotional one. But this book is something different as it belongs to the category of therapeutic writing. Ernaux also talks about this therapeutic writing beautifully in her other book, A Woman's Story.