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3.5 stars

French author, Annie Ernaux, showed up on my bookish radar when she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022.

The Academy praised “her for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.��

This description beckoned me to explore her writing so I’m pleased to have finally read one of her books. Annie Ernaux was born in Normandy in 1940. In ‘A Man’s Place,�� she explores memories, family stories, relationships, and emotions. Her writing is stripped down, known as “flat writing,�� (l’ecriture plate). The tone is flat and I think some readers might describe it as emotionless, but it is because of the tone that I see many emotions swirling. In the few places where she mentions feelings or emotions, I imagine a flood of them, so much so that they finally poke through this very reserved writing style.

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.

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.

He started milking the cows at five o’clock in the morning, cleaning out the stables, grooming the horses, and milking the cows again in the evening. In exchange he was given a place to sleep, free meals, some pocket money, and they did his laundry for him. He slept above the stables on a straw mattress with no sheets.

Throughout the book I am reminded of my own father. I wonder if this type of writing promotes this convergence of remembrances. Or perhaps it was the similarities of their lifestyles. My father was taken out of school to work on his parent’s land at age 8; however, he lived at home until he married my mother.

Ernaux’s parents met at the rope factory. Then her father worked as a roofer. When he fell from a rafter, her parents looked for a business they could manage, one that didn’t require a lot of start-up money. They bought a grocery store. Because they had to grant credit, they struggled financially. Her father had to get a second job while her mother ran the business.

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. . .

I like the way she explores her thoughts and feelings. In the above paragraph, I sense her emotions of separation, the feeling of her father as unknowable, the sense of a lack of connection between them. However, when she’s not writing, but just remembering him, something warmer comes into view.

It’s a short book, less than one hundred pages, but there’s a lot packed in. Ernaux’s approach to the past doesn’t include nostalgia, which at times feels a bit strange, but perhaps suits her not fitting in but very observant personality. In an interview with Jeffrey Brown, Ernaux says that to write is to fight forgetting.�� I think that’s what I like best about the book . . . the remembering, the fighting to hold onto that, to become more of whoever you’re supposed to be or perhaps have decided to be or not to be because this man was your father.