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�The worst thing about shame is that we imagine we are the only ones to experience it.�

First and foremost, a hearty congratulations to Annie Ernaux for winning the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, an extreme international honor that cements a writer into the proverbial canon of literary greats and ensures their work is reprinted, translated and readily available. Shame, originally published in 1998 and later translated into English by Tanya Leslie, is a snapshot of French society in 1952 that grapples with many of the themes Ernaux is celebrated for: the clinical investigation of the self and memory and, as the title would suggest, earnest examinations of feeling shame. �My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon,� begins Ernaux’s novella where this incident on June 15th, 1952, becomes �the first date I remember with unerring accuracy from my childhood,� because it �introduces the era when I shall never cease to feel ashamed,� a feeling that she carries with her all her life. While the novella is fiction, it reads very much like a historical memoir and is less a narrative and more an account of the social conditions of the narrator’s town and private school as well as the world events occurring that summer of 1952 that forever reshaped her own familiarity with herself. This slim novel is an intriguing look at narrative possibilities, with a brilliant depth of examination and a coolness of tone paired with precise and powerful language that reconstruct a dynamic portrait of life in a specific time and place that manages to resonate with universal emotional impact.

�Shame became a new way of living for me. I don't think I was even aware of it, it had become part of my own body.�

The catalyst for the book here is a brief but lasting moment of violence that will �breathe disaster� through every aspect of the narrator's life. �Now everything in our life is synonymous with shame,� she writes, seeing how this one moment refocused all she thought and knew about life. Much of the shame felt in the novel comes from the idea that � “no one except us� behaves this way,’� which is all the more a threatening feeling in a society that promotes conformity and fears aberration. �To be like everyone else was people’s universal ambition, the ultimate dream,� she tells us, �those who were different were thought to be eccentric or even deranged.� In order to portray just the sort of society this is, Ernaux goes into great detail to reproduce 1952 for the reader. I shall process them like documents, examining them from different angles to give them meaning,� Ernaux writes, �in other words, I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.� While the style of this ethnological study does read as a listing of facts and observations, first delving into the city and the social structures within it before turning attention to the all-girls Catholic school she attended, the cumulative weight of insights and explanations begins to produce a very nuanced and detailed portrait of a society that you begin to feel yourself immersed within. Told from the adult perspective in 1996, this is �the bond between the little girl of 1952 and the woman who is writing this manuscript,� through which we see life as a collection of events following one another, shame always a shadow over them.

�Everything that cements this world is encouraged, everything that threatens it is denounced and vilified.�

We get an excellent depiction of post-war France, and the social and cultural norms down to linguistic choices that define the city of Y in the year 1952. We see the ways social classes interact and the narrator’s space here (her parents being shopkeepers), though the most of the hierarchies examined are those of the private school she attends. �Instruction and religion are inseparably linked, both in time and in space,� she informs us and everything is strictly rule oriented �yet these rules are never perceived as being coercive.� That said, she feels �compelled to use the present tense to list and describe these rules, as if they have remained as immutable as they were for me at the time,� and it is evident how this sort of upbringing and extreme hierarchical perspective on society (even hanging out with public school girls is considered a taboo) would make the narrator view the violent event of her childhood as something that has shaken her loose from the perceived safety of her social position and piety.

�Now I can see the good little girl who goes to private school, enjoying the power and ideology of a world symbolizing truth, progress and perfection, a world which, in her eyes, she would never fail.�

This belief in a fall from grace takes on a deep emotional and moral tone as if she has discovered she doesn’t belong in the society around her. �Was I doomed to pick up every single sentence that reminded us of our place in society?� she wonders, which is a really personal feeling that I think we all have once we notice ourselves out of place. Which is what lands so well in this novel: the idea that shame is something that is so personally felt and specific yet also universal. This was particularly interesting to read on the heels of completing several works by Simone de Beauvoir, particularly Inseparable which, also an account of French private schooling, demonstrates how religious hierarchies weaponize shame and guilt as a method of obliging obedience at the punishment of being outcast.

Equally important to this book is the idea of memory, and how each compounding event across our lives recalibrates our relationship to our past. When looking at photographs from her twelfth year she finds she can barely link the young girl in the photo to the self writing the book in 1996, but surely they are the same. Time and our experience make memory a frail thing, and the idea of examining memory through the newspapers of 1952 in an attempt to recreate the world as it was is an interesting way to refresh the background thoughts that would be in everyone's head at the time.

�This can be said about shame: those who experience it feel that anything can happen to them, that the shame will never cease and that it will only be followed by more shame.�

Ernaux is a gifted writer and I am excited to have read a novel from the newest Nobel winner, all the more excited that I have quite enjoyed it. It’s brief and quiet, though the pieces really fall into place and my enjoyment of it only increased the following day after finishing it as I found myself thinking about it frequently. �It was normal to feel ashamed: I saw it as an inescapable fatality,� Ernaux writes, and this novel takes a clever approach to examining just how much society is bent towards inflicting shame upon us, with Ernaux reminding us that it is something we all inevitably endure and in our shared experiences of shame and frailties of memory we find ourselves joined as fellow humans.An interesting book, one written with a very clinical approach to the subject that performs wonderful artistry. This was my first experience with Ernaux but it will certainly not be my last.

4/5

�In his writings, Proust suggests that our memory is separate from us, residing in the ocean breeze or the smells of early autumn—things linked to the earth that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind. For me and no doubt many of my contemporaries, memories are associated with ephemeral things such as a fashionable belt or a summer hit and therefore the act of remembering can do nothing to reaffirm my sense of identity or continuity. It can only confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.�