Narrative
A Man's Place
La Place
Annie Ernaux · 1983
Synopsis
Two months after passing the competitive examination that makes her a teacher of literature, the narrator loses her father. She sets out to tell his life: school left at twelve to work on a farm, the factory, the trade of roofer, then the café-grocery opened in Normandy, which keeps him and raises him a degree above his station. She also tells of the distance that her own studies have put between her and this man.
Context
The narrative appeared from Gallimard in 1983 and received the Prix Renaudot the following year. Its author gives up the novel here, which she judges impossible for conveying a life subject to necessity and which seems to her to betray her father's modest existence. She adopts what she calls a flat writing, without poetry of memory, the very one she once used to give her parents important news. The book marks her definitive break with fiction and combines life narrative, biography and social observation.
Who it is for
A narrative in a deliberately stripped-down language, without metaphor or commentary: this sobriety is the book's chosen approach, not a stylistic flaw.
Prizes and reception
Prix Renaudot 1984. In English, A Man's Place, in Tanya Leslie's translation, was reissued in 2020 by Fitzcarraldo Editions.
Sources for this page 8
The pages consulted to check this page.