Reads #159-61

Annie Ernaux: The Years and Exteriors (trans by Alison L Sayer and Tanya Leslie respectively)

Fernanda Melchor: Paradais (trans Sophie Hughes)

Ernaux, Nobel Laureate writes with frankness about where she is from and about her adult life – unflinchingly, would probably be the word. She is in many ways an inheritor of the mantle of de Beauvoir, with less of the forthright politicking, which is not to say that what she says in unpolitical, it is just not framed as such. It is life-telling, with an acute awareness and apparently unswerving honesty.

Exteriors: is a short book 80 pages. It is a collection of thoughts and observations as she is passing through the world in the late 80s and early 90s. There’s no theme, no great structure, just whatever takes her fancy to record and then to publish: sometimes it is a simple observation about the way someone looks or carries themselves:

“In a Metro carriage, a boy and a girl argue and stroke other, alternately, as if they were alone in the world. But they know that’s not true: every now and then they stare insolently at the other passengers. My heart sinks. I tell myself that this is what writing is for me.”

The switches between insight and banality are fascinating and also, hugely relieving – to me at least – because much of this sounds like what goes on in my head – and therefore what I guess goes on in many other heads – but it is written down and made available to the world.

The Years: published first in France in 2008, the book relates moments in Ernaux’s life between 1940-2006, but in a tricksy, not entirely trustworthy way – which isn’t to say it feels like she is deliberately exaggerating or ornamenting, but more that because she relies on memory – over that time span – and on emotive triggers, and digressive re-telling, it is all very hard to pin down. It is interesting that the book is presented in the white cover of Fitzcaraldos ‘factual’ output, but has nevertheless also been described as fiction. This “slippery narrative” is, Ernaux writes, “composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes”, it places the book squarely in the realm of Proust, and its is not cowed.

Ernaux comes from a working class background in Normandy, and has become a lecturer and literary figure based on the edge of Paris, where she raised two sons and divorced their father.

The narrator slips between “we” and “she”, and the story related covers a personal life and an idiosyncratic selection of world and French social / political events. The feeling I got as the booked moved forward through time was that the stories got shorter, more economical – less ruminatory and prone to digression – almost like time spinning down a plughole…which could of course be completely illusory. Anyway, this is highly recommended and I intend to read it again soon.

“We strongly sensed that with the pill, life would never be the same again. We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.“

Paradais: I rarely put “bad” reviews up here because I don’t see the point, I should just move on, but I found this a deeply objectionable book and one which took far longer to get through than its 120 pages warranted, so I’ll be brief. Paradais is a gated-community in Mexico: Polo is a poor kid who works there as a kind of caretaker / gardner, “Fatboy” is roughly the same age, but is a spoilt child of one of the resident families. Polo hangs out with Fatboy because he gets him free drink and drugs. The price is that he has to listen to Fatboy’s sociopathic, violently pornographic musings about what he would do to the mother of some other kids in his school, Señora Marian, who is also a resident of the community. The story wanders around various little episodes between this mismatched pair and Fatboy’s increasingly graphic and bizarre fantasies – often involving late night sitting outdoors drinking purloined booze. Polo’s mum is a hardworking cleaner at the compound, which is how he got the job, who despairs of ever having enough to keep her kids fed. So, as Fatboy actually begins to make plans to take action – breaking into the family house of the Señora so that he can facilitate his assault, Polo sees that he can use the break in to steal goods which he can sell and help out his own family.