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Available
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Publication
Amsterdam De Arbeiderspers cop. 1985
User reviews
LibraryThing member bell7
This blend of fiction and memoir begins with a death: the author/narrator's father, sixty-seven, passes away soon after she passes her examinations to become a teacher. What follows is a reflection on her father's life, their relationship, and her thoughts on the process of writing the narrative
For whatever reason, I had built this up in my head as a difficult story. It's not, in fact. The story is spare and simple, an outline of an ordinary life as seen through the eyes of a daughter who sometimes recounts how her father felt as a working class man breaking into the middle class and always feeling a little backward, and other times illustrates how they didn't understand each other at all. It reads like a memoir written when the loss of her father was fresh, but is framed as somewhere between fiction and nonfiction and, according to the last page, was written from November of 1982 to June 1983. I'll be sure to read the companion work, A Woman's Story, soon.
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itself.For whatever reason, I had built this up in my head as a difficult story. It's not, in fact. The story is spare and simple, an outline of an ordinary life as seen through the eyes of a daughter who sometimes recounts how her father felt as a working class man breaking into the middle class and always feeling a little backward, and other times illustrates how they didn't understand each other at all. It reads like a memoir written when the loss of her father was fresh, but is framed as somewhere between fiction and nonfiction and, according to the last page, was written from November of 1982 to June 1983. I'll be sure to read the companion work, A Woman's Story, soon.
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LibraryThing member Petroglyph
After the death of her father Ernaux decides to write his biography and looks back on her relationship with him. And while the biography itself is interesting enough, it is the class lens through which Ernaux filters everything: her parents are decidedly and proudly working class (farming stock,
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but they operate a café and a small grocery store), while she herself has gone on to enter middle class. That filter adds a layer of melancholy as the class distinction precludes full understanding -- neither her father nor Ernaux herself would want to walk in the other’s shoes -- and I thought it really elevated the book into Proper Literature. Good stuff. Show Less
LibraryThing member ariesblue
The is my first novel to Annie Ernaux ,she mixes both formal and slang language in a unique way,i cant say i like it,but it was new for me,she wrote with her own special writing style,very smooth not complicated at all....and narrates in an open and honest way...
a short autobiography about the life
her childhood memories, the strange image she hold for her father ,love and at the same time embarrassment of his habits as a peasant....
although he was an ambitious hard working man,who manged to have his own cafe ,she still ashamed of his poor education and looking down at him,and thinks that he was jealous that she could got a better education than he have got,and even think that he get angry when he sees her reading......
she developed a humiliated portrait of a father...
so many complexities and psychological problems of the father daughter relationship....
her marriage which was for her a desire to change her former social class .....
a short autobiography about the life
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of her father and her relation to him until his death....her childhood memories, the strange image she hold for her father ,love and at the same time embarrassment of his habits as a peasant....
although he was an ambitious hard working man,who manged to have his own cafe ,she still ashamed of his poor education and looking down at him,and thinks that he was jealous that she could got a better education than he have got,and even think that he get angry when he sees her reading......
she developed a humiliated portrait of a father...
so many complexities and psychological problems of the father daughter relationship....
her marriage which was for her a desire to change her former social class .....
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LibraryThing member thorold
A short, beautifully clear and (superficially) simple analysis by a daughter of the way she perceives and perceived her father's life, across the generation- and class- gap that divides them.
The father was a Normandy peasant boy, born before the First World War, who has managed to work his way up
The father was a Normandy peasant boy, born before the First World War, who has managed to work his way up
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to become the proud owner of a small café-grocery; the daughter has grown up in the forties and fifties to go to university and become a teacher of literature, and thus automatically middle-class, with quite different tastes and values from her working-class parents. Her obvious admiration for her father's toughness and determination is mixed up with her guilt about the patronising element that comes into her view of his attitudes and aspirations. And of course it's all complicated by her memory of the affectionate moments they shared in her childhood, and her sadness at witnessing his illness and death. Superb writing, and a topic I found very interesting because there are so many echoes there of the way people of my parents' generation related to their working-class parents. Show Less
LibraryThing member baswood
In many ways this is a simple story, told in the first person as a sort of autobiography of the authors early life. She starts when she has recently passed her practical examination to become a Professor and she writes home to her parents with the good news. Her mother replies that her father is
Annie is married with a child of her own, her husband cannot stand visiting her parents, the banality of their existence upsets him and Annie realises that the gap cannot be breached. She can and does return to her parents during her fathers final illness and does what she can to help, but she now comes from a different world. The strength of this short novel (113 pages) comes from the way that Ernaux uses the words and phrases that her parents would have used and in the closely observed situations that she describes. The paragraphs are short and seem to float freely and she manages to say an awful lot without using too many words. One gets the feeling that every word in this novel has been thought through and weighed carefully for its effect. It goes without saying that the world created/remebered of a small town in Normandy (France) feels absolutely right. This short novel may be slight, but it is beautifully formed and so four stars.
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ill. This causes Annie to think about her parents lives and in particular about her father. He came from a very poor family and had to leave school at 14 years to become a cowherd on a local farm. He was too young to fight in the first world war, but the lack of men enabled him to get a job in a factory. He was a good worker and saved hard until he could afford to get married and eventually to buy a small grocer’s shop with a cafe attached. Annie was the only child that survived and she remembers her early life helping out sometimes in the cafe. Annie studied hard at school passing examinations and getting a scholarship so that she left her parents far behind. She has become part of the bourgeoise while her parents have remained firmly working class. The difference in life styles and in expectations gets progressively bigger as Annie grows up and then away from home. Annie is married with a child of her own, her husband cannot stand visiting her parents, the banality of their existence upsets him and Annie realises that the gap cannot be breached. She can and does return to her parents during her fathers final illness and does what she can to help, but she now comes from a different world. The strength of this short novel (113 pages) comes from the way that Ernaux uses the words and phrases that her parents would have used and in the closely observed situations that she describes. The paragraphs are short and seem to float freely and she manages to say an awful lot without using too many words. One gets the feeling that every word in this novel has been thought through and weighed carefully for its effect. It goes without saying that the world created/remebered of a small town in Normandy (France) feels absolutely right. This short novel may be slight, but it is beautifully formed and so four stars.
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LibraryThing member bookomaniac
This autobiographical book is a very harsh settlement between the writer and her parents, and especially her father. She grew up in rural France, in a small Norman town where there was a very strict morality and work ethic, strongly influenced by the Catholic Church. Ernaux first briefly describes
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the life of her grandparents, small farmers, but then mainly focuses on her surly father. The first half of the book has a downright naturalistic slant: the hard work, the injustice of life, the impossibility to enjoy life. Ernaux describes it as clinically distant and in the second half portrays her own rebellion against the life and worldview of her parents. Between the lines you occasionally notice some self-doubt, namely whether she has not betrayed her own environment by her entry into the world of bourgeoisie. “Je hasarde une explication: écrire c'est le dernier recours quand on a trahi.” In that sense, this hard book may be a form of therapeutic writing. for what she calls neutrality, a dry enumeration of facts and events, but this booklet is not exactly that, almost every sentence reveals a conscious distancing from the world of her parents, no attempt at all to empathize. whether Ernaux never transcended the phase of the rebellion In that respect I think 'Les Années', her most famous work and also autobiographical, is a much more successful attempt! Show Less
LibraryThing member CarltonC
This could have been an exploration of how education disenfranchises you from your roots, from your parents, but instead this short book concentrates on trying to describe her father’s life as objectively as possible.
I thought to myself “One day I shall have to explain all this.” What I meant
Written in 1983, this attempt at a purely factual biography of Ernaux’s father (born in 1899 in Northern France) is written in short anecdotal sections of a few paragraphs. It attempts to illuminate why he was extremely class conscious, dwelling on the material context of his life, his work and living conditions.
Ernaux’s father starts working at 11 as a farm labourer, looking after dairy cows and helping out at harvest. He is conscripted towards the end of the First World War, although there is no mention of this, other than lifting his ambitions above being a farm labourer, so that he subsequently goes to work in a factory, rather than returning to the farm. He marries and saves sufficient to be able to open a grocery shop, although this is managed mainly by Ernaux’s mother, as Ernaux’s father continues to work in various jobs, in time becoming a foreman.
Ernaux’s father is too old to be conscripted at the beginning of the Second World War, so becomes a full-time shopkeeper, and at the end of the war, moving back to his old village where they also run a cafe next door to the shop, the two ground floor rooms of their house.
Ernaux articulates her father’s fear of not maintaining the status he had achieved, his fear of poverty and fear of using local patois, rather than correct French, with using incorrect language being the greater fear. This concern, or fear, resonates with me, as my mother who was a farmer’s daughter (contemporary with Ernaux, but who left school at 15 to help on the farm), married a middle class bank clerk, and has two “voices”, more colloquial with her family and farm friends, and a posher voice when speaking with other mothers in our village.
Although Ernaux is mainly objective in her description of her description of her father’s life, she makes her subjectiveness intrude several times to provide a framework against which to contemplate her father. I found this description of someone who is afraid of being “found out” to be compassionate and believable, with acceptance of his improved place in society perhaps having been fulfilled through his daughter’s academic achievement, allowing some happiness before he dies, aged about 68.
This is not a romantic memoir, it is an honest attempt to report a life, and to acknowledge that such an attempt at objective reportage, whilst recording the facts, might also be a betrayal of the life her father wanted to present.
Epigraph: ‘May I venture an explanation: writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed.’ —Yūko Tsushima
I thought to myself “One day I shall have to explain all this.” What I meant
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was to write about my father, his life and the distance that had come between us during my adolescence. Although it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love.”Written in 1983, this attempt at a purely factual biography of Ernaux’s father (born in 1899 in Northern France) is written in short anecdotal sections of a few paragraphs. It attempts to illuminate why he was extremely class conscious, dwelling on the material context of his life, his work and living conditions.
Ernaux’s father starts working at 11 as a farm labourer, looking after dairy cows and helping out at harvest. He is conscripted towards the end of the First World War, although there is no mention of this, other than lifting his ambitions above being a farm labourer, so that he subsequently goes to work in a factory, rather than returning to the farm. He marries and saves sufficient to be able to open a grocery shop, although this is managed mainly by Ernaux’s mother, as Ernaux’s father continues to work in various jobs, in time becoming a foreman.
Ernaux’s father is too old to be conscripted at the beginning of the Second World War, so becomes a full-time shopkeeper, and at the end of the war, moving back to his old village where they also run a cafe next door to the shop, the two ground floor rooms of their house.
Ernaux articulates her father’s fear of not maintaining the status he had achieved, his fear of poverty and fear of using local patois, rather than correct French, with using incorrect language being the greater fear. This concern, or fear, resonates with me, as my mother who was a farmer’s daughter (contemporary with Ernaux, but who left school at 15 to help on the farm), married a middle class bank clerk, and has two “voices”, more colloquial with her family and farm friends, and a posher voice when speaking with other mothers in our village.
Although Ernaux is mainly objective in her description of her description of her father’s life, she makes her subjectiveness intrude several times to provide a framework against which to contemplate her father. I found this description of someone who is afraid of being “found out” to be compassionate and believable, with acceptance of his improved place in society perhaps having been fulfilled through his daughter’s academic achievement, allowing some happiness before he dies, aged about 68.
This is not a romantic memoir, it is an honest attempt to report a life, and to acknowledge that such an attempt at objective reportage, whilst recording the facts, might also be a betrayal of the life her father wanted to present.
Epigraph: ‘May I venture an explanation: writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed.’ —Yūko Tsushima
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LibraryThing member Narshkite
Ernaux has a gift for telling the story of a person, of a time, without the dishonest nostalgia most people seem to think necessary. It makes me crazy how people think it is necessary to dehumanize the dead by speaking of only what the speaker considers the good things. This is so judgmental! This
Ernaux's father was a man who sacrificed, who wanted to better for his child, and then resented the ways in which she grew through education and exposure to an easier less primal life. Rather than actually trying to learn he steamrolls over what he would characterize as bourgeois pretension but which is really just manners and an interest in the actual world as it exists in the moment. My own father did the same, and now that I have an educated new adult of my own I have to make a conscious effort to not just lean back into the "in my day" arrogance of age, and rather to allow myself to learn from him (which is how I grow as a person rather than aging into a relic, and which allows me to feel the joy of my child's accomplishments.) None of that means he was not a good man. He was a coarse man who loved his family and worked hard and who generally did not let his resentments get in the way of civility, it is just who he was. Once again Ernaux paints a very full portrait of a man in very few pages, a portrait which embraces things relatable to many while very specifically describing one very idiosyncratic person, and also illustrates the growth and chance of the pre and post war periods in Europe, allowing us to see a France long in the past. Lovely. spare, haunting.
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is what I think is good so this is what we will discuss. This is honest and each reader can absorb the information and will think whatever she thinks of the man presented.Ernaux's father was a man who sacrificed, who wanted to better for his child, and then resented the ways in which she grew through education and exposure to an easier less primal life. Rather than actually trying to learn he steamrolls over what he would characterize as bourgeois pretension but which is really just manners and an interest in the actual world as it exists in the moment. My own father did the same, and now that I have an educated new adult of my own I have to make a conscious effort to not just lean back into the "in my day" arrogance of age, and rather to allow myself to learn from him (which is how I grow as a person rather than aging into a relic, and which allows me to feel the joy of my child's accomplishments.) None of that means he was not a good man. He was a coarse man who loved his family and worked hard and who generally did not let his resentments get in the way of civility, it is just who he was. Once again Ernaux paints a very full portrait of a man in very few pages, a portrait which embraces things relatable to many while very specifically describing one very idiosyncratic person, and also illustrates the growth and chance of the pre and post war periods in Europe, allowing us to see a France long in the past. Lovely. spare, haunting.
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LibraryThing member evatkaplan
AFTER reading a WOMAN'S STORY, the author writes about her father after he dies. again, she is very cold and no warm feelings. she tries to write as if she wasn't involved, but she is the daughter!
LibraryThing member suesbooks
Ernaux is an excellent, precise writer, but after reading A woman's story this was much too repetitive. Her perceptions of the character representing her father is interesting, but how well does a child really know a parent?
Language
Original language
French
Original publication date
1983
ISBN
9029515651 / 9789029515658