A Woman's Story

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Festeggio il Premio Nobel leggendo gli ultimi due titoli che mi mancavano, felice perché so che ne sta per arrivare un altro. Qué decir? Una escritura auténtica y honesta. Conocer que la vida y la historia de una hija están pegadas a las de la madre, es un hecho sencillo y a la vez universal. Lograr transmitirlo tan bien es cosa de talentos excepcionales. Una de las mejores cosas que he leído. Les soy sincero, me apenó que no haya ganado Houellebecq el premio Nobel. Ahora que conozco un poquitín la obra y la escritura de Annie, pienso que fue una buena decisión. Mientras leía, también pensé un poco en Proust. Los estilos y escrituras de los dos no se parecen en nada, están en las antípodas, pero recordé el esnobismo de Marcel, de la aristocracia Francesa y me encantó encontrar aquí el otro lado: la autenticidad y la humanidad sencilla de la otra Francia, la del mundo. As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent. I will have to present another list that includes the coarse taunts, the hooting and jeering, the insults passed off as jokes, whereby the male counselors made her an object of scorn and derision, they whose verbal hegemony went unquestioned and was even admired by the female counselors. Underneath a style that might seem detached, even cold, there lies a need to mitigate Ernaux’s loneliness without sounding false or self-indulgent, and the carefully described scenes of moments spent with her mother shine for their simplicity and honesty, creating an intimate ambiance that allows the reader to be part of the story of Ernaux’s mother.

One could tell whether she was upset simply by looking at her face. In private she didn’t mince her words and told us straight out what she thought. She called me a beast, a slut, and a bitch, or told me I was “unpleasant”. She would often hit me, usually by slapping my face, or occasionally punching my shoulders. Five minutes later, she would take me into her arms and I was her “poppet.”The subtle differences between the two worlds become even more glaring when the mother moves in with her daughter. To a house where people read Le Monde and listen to Bach. There, where Ernaux lives with her husband and two sons, new battle lines emerge for the well-rehearsed mother-daughter skirmishes. The demands Annie Ernaux makes on herself as a daughter collide painfully with the demands she makes on her mother. Again and again, she draws individual experiences to a collective, general human level. This leads her, for example, to the following beautiful conclusion:

The author beautifully describes how her mother behaved towards her and the reason behind it. But she sadly stops her discussion about it there. This is a topic that requires deeper discussion, and the author had a golden opportunity to discuss other ways parents behave, like the perumthachan complex (jealousy of parents to successful children). She sadly squandered this opportunity. But we can't blame her for it, though, as she wrote it at a time of grief, and she never planned to discuss intensely about human behavior in this book. For this Prix Renaudot-winning author, childhood was not just a time of life but a cottage industry. A trilogy of books intersect at her youth: the story of Ernaux's father, told in La Place ; her semi-autobiographical first novel, Cleaned Out ; and A Woman's Story . In this work, the woman of the title is the author's mother and the story is a brief, aching requiem for an intense but qualified relationship. Ernaux's mother (she is never named), who was born in a small town in Normandy where she saw the fruition of the ``only ambition which lay within her reach: running a grocery business,'' finally succumbs to Alzheimer's disease. This life's very commonness presents difficulties for her daughter who is both ashamed of her mother and aware of the immense difficulties the woman surmounted to give her daughter something better. ``It was only when my mother . . . became history that I started to feel less alone and out of place in a world ruled by words and ideas, the world where she had wanted me to live.'' (May) Inizia quel percorso di incombenze, decisioni, scelte, burocrazia, che ogni morte si porta dietro nel mondo d’oggi. E che ha il potere di risultare sempre profondamente assurda, e sgradevole: ci si vorrebbe concentrare sul dolore, la perdita, l’assenza, e invece… It was only the day before yesterday that I overcame the fear of writing "My mother died" on a blank sheet of paper, not as the first line of a letter but as the opening of a book. "I shall continue to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years. Perhaps I should wait until her illness and death have merged into the past, like other events in my life—my father's death and the breakup with my husband—so that I feel the detachment which makes it easier to analyze one's memories. But right now I am incapable of doing anything else."Quite by accident, I’ve recently read two stories about mother/daughter relationships. My Phantoms was an earlier novel. I’m aging and I have an adult daughter, so both stories evoked personal reflections of my own mother/daughter relationship