Sex, Time, and Memory: Annie Ernaux’s Young Man, by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee Book Reviews [email protected] Mon, 08/21/2023 - 15:04 The Young Man—forthcoming from Seven Stories in September 2023—is Annie Ernaux’s first novel in English translation after receiving the most coveted honor in literature, the Nobel Prize in Literature, in October 2022 (see WLT’s review of Le Jeune Homme, May 2023, 73). A slim book of autofiction, translated by Alison Strayer, it is a few pages shorter than Simple Passion (1991), her shortest book so far. With deft terseness, Ernaux recounts her short relationship with a student thirty years younger than her. The epigraph reiterates the raison d’être of her writing: living is incomplete without evaluating life’s experiences. Life is spontaneous facticity, spent in accordance with one’s desires and impulses. Writing throws new light on life. It unearths, as Ernaux puts it in The Girl’s Story (2016), something that is irreducible to any singular explanation. In a startling sentence at the beginning of The Young Man, Ernaux equates writing with the need and possibility of overcoming “the fatigue, the dereliction” of sex and the violence of orgasm. She feels writing brings “greater pleasure” than sex, because it doesn’t abandon you to a postcoital void. It is reminiscent of Roland Barthes’s idea of body-writing in The Pleasure of the Text (1973), of writing as a fragmented overcoming of... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'
[ World Literature Today | 2023-08-21 20:04:48 UTC ]
So you're an admirer of James Joyce's "Ulysses"? Well, thank Trieste for that book. So you're an admirer of James Joyce's "Ulysses"? Well, thank Trieste for that book. Why? Gordon Bowker's "James Joyce: A New Biography" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 608 pp., $35) shows readers how living in that... Continue reading at Los Angeles Times
[ Los Angeles Times | 2012-07-15 00:00:00 UTC ]
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