It’s already known that TikTok books’ reviews have been experiencing a rise in terms of reach and influence. In this context, one of the most favorite authors of the moment is Annie Ernaux. The French author offers a particular reading experience with her writings. There, we find an universe of personal stories that reflects the subjectivity of being a woman born and raised surrounded by patriarchal rules and abuses.
To understand better about her bibliography, it’s important to contextualize Annie Ernaux’s story. She is a French woman born in Lillebonne, Normandie, in 1940. Ernaux had worker-class parents and a humble childhood. She studied at Université de Rouen Normandie and became a Literature Professor. From 1974 to 2022, the author has published 22 books. She describes her writing style as “autosociobiographies” and explains that the narratives are about a ‘transpersonal I‘.which navigates between the most intimate aspects of the character, the deepest universal existential themes and the social context in which the character is immersed.
Annie Ernaux draws inspiration from her own story, her pain, and her archives, such as intimate journals, photographs, lists, daily life, and her family and friends circles. This way, the narratives have a social insertion and we deeply get into the social context she was immersed in.
Ernaux’s writing style
Clara Boberg Perino, a literature student at Universidade de São Paulo who researches the female melancholy and has Annie Ernaux’s books as main bibliography, describes it.
“She dives into her repressed memories and produces writings that, despite their painful essence, it’s impossible to not identify with. She is in France writing about a historical period that I haven’t experienced and I, in Brazil, almost 60 years after that story, can find myself in her writings. And it’s not only about me, but about the power of her writings, where something extremely intimate can interact with readers from all walks of life”
In “L’événement” (O acontecimento) Annie Ernaux confesses: “The true objective of my life might be just this: that my body, my sensations, and my thoughts become writing, that is something intelligible and universal, my existence completely dissolved in the minds and lives of others”.
This way, developing her work with straight-ahead language and putting on evidence the cruelty of the patriarchal society, in 2022, she was the first French woman who has won the Literature Nobel Prize and the seventeenth woman to win it since 1901. The Sweden Arts Academy congratulated Ernaux for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Also, the French President Emmanuel Macron saluted her award via tweet, calling her a “voice” for “women’s freedom and the forgotten ones of the century”.
THE BOOKS
According to the data published by Le Parisien, Ernaux’s best-selling book is “La Place”, with 800.000 copies sold, which is followed by “Le Jeune Homme” and “Les Années”. The estimation is that she has already sold more than 4 million books. In Brazil, “La Place” (O lugar) is also in first place. In 2022, it took the seventh position on the List of the Most Sold Books by Veja. Moreover, “L’évenement” (O acontecimento) was put on the fifteenth position and “Les Années” (Os anos) the nineteenth one.
The success of her books was also realized by Cláudia Consuelo Amigo Pino, Professor on the Department of Modern Literature at Universidade de São Paulo. The book “L’évenement” (O acontecimento) cast a spell on her and, seeing the power of the Ernaux’s narrative, she started to include the book in her classes. In an interview the Professor says: “Once I got into the classroom, I saw the shine on the eyes of all students, all of them wanted to speak, they already knew her. A lot of exceptional things happen when I give classes about her books”.
One example that Claudia gave involves the evangelical students that, despite their beliefs, during the reading, they were cheering in favor of the character’s abortion: “I realized that Annie Ernaux’s literature goes far away from our convictions, it’s about respecting each other, respecting the other’s needs and pains. That’s the impact of literature”.
On the same side, Clara Boberg Perino said that she chose this author as a subject of her research due to the “rawness of her writing”. The student also highlights that “Ernaux has always broken with the academic idea of what narrative should be. It is necessary to say that the writing does not provoke sadness itself, as the facts that are being narrated handle that. She gives us small sentences that make our own reality collapse. An example, taken from “L’évenement” (O acontecimento): ‘In the face of a destroyed career, a knitting needle in the vagina didn’t weigh much‘”.
THE SOCIAL IMPACT
Annie Ernaux writes about the issues women faced in the patriarchal society of 1960s France — issues that we are still grappling with today. For example, the author’s illegal abortion in 1963, which is the central theme of “L’Événement” and “Armoires Vides”. The life-threatening risks women face in such situations are still experienced by approximately 1.000.000 women every year in Brazil alone, according to the Federal Nursing Council.
The psychological abuses and the imposition of a ‘right female life’ the protagonist of “La femme gelée” and the abuse suffered by the main character in “Memoire de fille” are still a reality in Brazil. It means that the gender inequality is still here depriving women of rights that have never been questioned when attributed to the men.
As reported by IBGE in 2022, more than 2,5 million Brazilian women have left their studies or careers to look after home or children. Furthermore, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), data shows that in Brazil, 320 children and adolescents are sexually exploited every 24 hours. The number may be even higher, as only seven out of every 100 cases are reported.
Another book that still reflects the nowaday’s society is “La honte” (A vergonha) in which Annie Ernaux writes in the third person about the domestic violence her mother suffered and she witnessed as a 12 years old child. The first sentence of the book brings the literary aspects Clara and Cláudia mentioned in the interviews. “My father tried to kill my mother on a Suna day in June, in the early afternoon”, the work with a very direct and concise language, and stating the essential information. The gender-based violence made explicit in this book has been the reality of 258.941 women in Brazil according to the report released by the Brazilian Forum on Public Security in 2023. Also, the same data revealed that the cases of femicide rose by 0.8%, totaling 1.467 records.
“It is a text that generates a certain solidarity or sisterhood. That’s why it is essential to be read in Brazil, a country where women’s rights could be much more developed and discussed within society” says Cláudia Consuelo Amigo Pino at the end of the interview.
In the same direction, Clara Boberg Perino affirms “We know these stories, many of us have lived them, by the way. Knowing that we are not alone is like a painful hug, but one that takes away the weight of questioning: am I the only one who feels this way? In the end, reading Annie Ernaux is, as she said, avenging our kind”.
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The article above was edited by Mariana do Patrocínio.
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