Exteriors

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Also the collapse of retail is clearly not effectuated in Ernaux her book, but can be seen sort of starting, with cashiers chatting, people to pick up trolleys being laid off and butcher visits as the heart of the social happening in the town.

Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux’s books – the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her. In doing so, it proposes a new way of thinking about literature and photography, and the ways in which shared themes – such as class, travel, social stereotypes, and individual identity within the modern urban environment – might be explored between these two forms. By focusing on surface appearances and remaining as factual as possible, Exteriors requires of the reader real, effortful contemplation to glean meaning (or to simply see, depending on your views on “truth”). it builds up into this really cool portrait of paris in the late 80s, as well as giving you an idea of how ernaux views the world in an even more raw and unfiltered way than her actual prose does.It was only after recording all these observations and evesdroppings that she became aware of how much of herself was included in the conversations of others. I read ones about her mother, her father, her early sexual life, an affair with an older, married man, an abortion, all in separate books, many based on detailed diaries she kept over the years. Graffiti (against colonial wars for instance) and homeless people often recur, being seen and documented by Annie Ernaux in this slim book.

Reminiscent of the poet Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without its Flow, a study of how grief mangles chronology, Simple Passion is a riveting investigation, in a less tragic key, into what happens to one’s experience of time in the throes of romantic obsession. I say that it’s about feeling overwhelmed because, in the preface, Ernaux describes how living in “a place bereft of memories, where the buildings are scattered over a huge area, a place with undefined boundaries, proved to be an overwhelming experience. So I think this is the last of the several brief memoirs or autofictions I have read and all in 2022 so far (! It’s a masterclass in understatement, a quality difficult to find nowadays, in literature or life (this sentence being a prime example).Such a delicate and wonderful way of looking at the world around her, using other people’s untold narratives as a way to view one’s own. It's easy for daily commuting and its related experiences to become boringly repetitive and uninteresting. In this memoire Ernaux sets out to relate her observations during her daily outings on the train, in the supermarket or the mall like a series of snapshots. So I got involved, heavily involved, deeply involved, right down to ending up with a tube in my womb, all because of a not-very-clever comment, all because of myself. i absolutely loved these journal entries (which may or may not be related to the fact that i myself have been making a note of such snapshots for as long as i can remember).

It's funny how delving into the lives of others, in only a handful of lines, can often prove to be more captivating to read than even the most labored of novels.The exhibitionism of people, discussing loudly their lives in public transport while being dressed in tracksuits, made me think of social media and how much easier it is nowadays to mass broadcast oneself to the world. Ez az első - és egyetlen, azt hiszem -, ami nem Ernaux életét tárgyalja, noha tulajdonképpen ezek a benyomások is személyesek. Reading Ernaux, I was reminded of how the pathway to owning the surrounding around us by putting the observations in a tabloid is a very indirect way of knowing ourselves.