Sunday book pick: Annie Ernaux’s writerly and personal selves come together in ‘Exteriors’
Translated by Tanya Leslie into English, the book is a collection of fragmented passages about day-to-day life written over seven years.
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When you are a Nobel laureate, even your diary entries are treasure troves of literary brilliance. Exteriors, written between 1985 and 1992, are Annie Ernaux’s fragmented passages about day-to-day life that are profound reminders of our existence and the transcendental role we play in strangers’s lives. Translated by Tanya Leslie from the French, Exteriors bridges the gap between two halves of Ernaux’s life – that of a writer and an anonymous observer of her small-town peers.
In her Author’s Note, Ernaux insists these journals aren’t a “study of urban sociology” but an “undefinable feeling of modernity associated with a new town.” Away from the elite setting of academic spaces and hallowed temples, epiphanies in the modern world can come at supermarkets and on public transport. And indeed, they often do.
Though Ernaux has lived in Clergy-Pontoise for twenty years, it is still a place “bereft of memories” and she feels like she is “hovering” in “no man’s land halfway between the earth and the sky.” Still, Clergy-Pontoise is not particularly dull. On any regular day, Ernaux meets children, young parents, screaming toddlers, temperamental shoppers, and moody senior citizens as she goes about town. The brief sightings and occasional snatches of their conversations fascinate her. She tries to piece...
