A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux
A Man’s Place is Annie Ernaux’s second book that I have read. A few months back I read I remain in Darkness, a powerful and haunting account on Annie’s Ernaux attempts to help her mother recover from Alzheimer’s disease, and then to bear witness to her gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. I loved Ernaux’s distinct style of writing–it is I suppose what we call auto-fiction, the interplay between autobiography and fiction, although Ernaux does not identify with this genre–and I was looking forward to reading more of her books.
A Man’s Place is also translated in English by Tanya Leslie and published by the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions. It’s only 76 long, and it is about the life and death of her father. It’s her father’s trajectory from farmworker (ouvrière) to a small-middle class by opening a small grocery store and café in a small town in rural Normandy. She reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life and the cultural and intellectual distance between the working-class lives of her parents and the increasingly middle-class world to which her education gave her.
"At home, when we spoke to one another, it was always in a querulous tone of voice. Only strangers were entitled to polite behaviour. The habit was so deep-rooted that my father, who applied himself to speaking properly in front of other people, would automatically revert to Norman dialect and to his broad accent and aggressive tone whenever he told me not to climb onto the heap of rubble in the yard. This ruined his efforts to create a good impression he never learned to scold me in proper French and, besides, I would never have taken seriously his threats about slapping me if he had spoken correctly.
For a long time, courtesy between parents and children remain a mystery to me. Also, it took me years to ‘understand’ the kindliness with which well-mannered people greet each other. At first, I felt ashamed, I didn’t deserve such consideration. Sometimes, I thought they had conceived a particular liking for me. Later I realised that their smiling faces and kind, earnest questions meant nothing more to them that eating with their mouth shut or blowing their noses discreetly. "
Reading Ernaux is an experience by itself. Even when she describes episodes of pain and deprivation or moments of tenderness, she writes with straightforwardness and honesty, an almost reflective sociological objectivity.