Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize shortlisted author of The Years.
The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, ANNIE ERNAUX
is considered by many to be France's most important literary voice.
She won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite
Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received
the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the
French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women
in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the
Man Booker International Prize.
ALISON L. STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator. She won the
Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and her work has been
shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Literature and for
Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, the Prix
litteraire France-Quebec, and the Man Booker International Prize.
She lives in Paris.
"The books are whittled down to an intense core—not a confession
but a kind of personal epistemology. ... One way to read
Ernaux’s book is as an attempt to understand that opaque, painful,
essential process of “becoming."
—Madeleine Schwartz, The New Yorker
"Since the 1970s, Ernaux has carved out a special place in the
French literary pantheon for her ability not just to excavate
individual memories, but to show the subtle ways they interact with
the collective experience..... Now, readers in English are
catching on."
—Laura Cappelle, The New York Times
"A Girl's Story is a profound and beautiful examination of the
impenetrable wall that time erects between the self we are, and the
selves we once were. I know of no other book that so vividly
illustrates the frustrations and the temptations of that barrier,
and our heartache and longing in trying to breach it. Annie Ernaux
is one of my favorite contemporary writers, original and true.
Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world
for months."
—Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?
“Another deeply felt, fearlessly honest exploration of female
desire, shame, and intellectual passion from the incomparable Annie
Ernaux.”
—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend
"Ernaux, one of France’s leading contemporary writers, mines her
shame to good effect. There’s no hysteria or prurience in her
writing; she approaches her history with precision, never
sentimentality. ... Revisiting painful periods is hardly new
territory for writers, but Ernaux distills a particular power from
the exercise. As she puts it, 'I am endowed by shame’s vast memory,
more detailed and implacable than any other, a gift unique to
shame.'”
—Joumana Khatib, The New York Times Book Review
"I came late to this French writer, who is becoming better known in
English translation, and the shock of recognition has not subsided.
Every so often you realise there is a great writer out there, a
whole world you have yet to explore, and with someone this good,
you want to take it slowly"
—Anne Enright in The Irish Times
"Written in 2013, although coming out a few years later, A Girl’s
Story predates Me Too as a narrative genre, but Ernaux’s body
of work speaks to the simplest and possibly best thing Me Too
offered women. It is her foundational exigency: how to remember
politically, in collective form. . . . Across the ample
particularities of over 40 years and 21 books, almost all short,
subject-driven memoirs, Ernaux has fundamentally destabilized and
reinvented the genre in French literature. "
—Audrey Wollen, The Nation
"Annie Ernaux writes memoir with such generosity and vulnerable
power that I find it difficult to separate my own memories from
hers long after I’ve finished reading. In A Girl’s Story she
detangles an adolescence rife with desire and shame, an era of both
internal and external debasement. Ernaux wisely ventures into the
gray areas of her memories; she doesn’t attempt to transcend their
power, nor to even 'understand' them, but to press them firmly into
this diamond of a book."
—Catherine Lacey, author of Pew and The Answers
"In this devastating yet deceptively simple work of autofiction,
Annie Ernaux retraces the origins of her identity as an artist to
the height of the Algerian War, and the loss of her innocence at
the cusp of womanhood. Sifting through the wreckage of her memory,
she queries its nature: whether we possess it, construct it, or
view it like a photograph, or as a form of cinema; whether, long
suppressed, it may be resurrected and reconstituted as
narrative—and where, in such an act, the author ends and the
character of the author begins. 'What is the belief that drives
her, if not that memory is a form of knowledge?' she asks. In
A Girl’s Story, Ernaux cements her position as a writer of immense
depth and grace."
—Sarah Gerard, author of Sunshine State
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