Publication
Amsterdam Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers 2022
ISBN
9789029545822
Language
Collections
Description
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
User reviews
LibraryThing member AnthonyTFS
Reading Annie Ernaux’s Happening. I am suspicious of its translation into English.
Ernaux writes: “En regardent la silhouette frêle, en imperméable, du petit employé, ses humiliations, devant la désolation sans espoir du film, je savais que mes règles ne reviendraient pas.” This is
Earlier, Ernaux writes: “Comme la dernière fois, des hommes attendaient, groupés au pied métro aérien.” Again I looked up the original because it is translated as: “Like last time, men were idly waiting, clustered at the foot of the Métro overhead.” That “idly” jarred as another piece of sloppy writing. How do you wait “un-idly”? But the adverb isn’t present in the original.
Further on, Ernaux uses the phrase: “pensant sans arrêt que je n’avais pas mes règles,” which is translated as: “obsessed with the fact that I no longer had my period”. There is a gulf of difference between obsession and perhaps, “thinking all the time”. The psychoanalytic jargon is used a few pages on when, “Je résistais sans pouvoir m’empêcher d’y penser à net événement. M’y abandonner me semblait effrayant” is translated as “Despite my efforts to fight it, I became obsessed with the idea. Obeying this impulse seemed a terrifying prospect.” Both “obsessed” and “terrifying” seem to escalate and change the tone of Ernaux’s prose considerably.
Although this translation reads fluidly enough, it seems to distort the original more than necessary. Translator friends with French: am I nitpicking? For now I’m going back to Alison L. Strayer’s translation of The Years, which seems to my amateur eye a more reliable rendition that is a considerable literary achievement in its own right.
Ernaux writes: “En regardent la silhouette frêle, en imperméable, du petit employé, ses humiliations, devant la désolation sans espoir du film, je savais que mes règles ne reviendraient pas.” This is
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translated as: “As I watched the frail figure of the boy in his cheap raincoat, the humiliations he suffered during his pathetic existence, somehow I knew the bleeding would not come back.” I consulted the original because “pathetic existence” didn’t ring true, seeming like poor writing. But it isn’t apparently what Ernaux intended, I assume, more a statement on the mood, “hopeless desolation” perhaps, of the film.Earlier, Ernaux writes: “Comme la dernière fois, des hommes attendaient, groupés au pied métro aérien.” Again I looked up the original because it is translated as: “Like last time, men were idly waiting, clustered at the foot of the Métro overhead.” That “idly” jarred as another piece of sloppy writing. How do you wait “un-idly”? But the adverb isn’t present in the original.
Further on, Ernaux uses the phrase: “pensant sans arrêt que je n’avais pas mes règles,” which is translated as: “obsessed with the fact that I no longer had my period”. There is a gulf of difference between obsession and perhaps, “thinking all the time”. The psychoanalytic jargon is used a few pages on when, “Je résistais sans pouvoir m’empêcher d’y penser à net événement. M’y abandonner me semblait effrayant” is translated as “Despite my efforts to fight it, I became obsessed with the idea. Obeying this impulse seemed a terrifying prospect.” Both “obsessed” and “terrifying” seem to escalate and change the tone of Ernaux’s prose considerably.
Although this translation reads fluidly enough, it seems to distort the original more than necessary. Translator friends with French: am I nitpicking? For now I’m going back to Alison L. Strayer’s translation of The Years, which seems to my amateur eye a more reliable rendition that is a considerable literary achievement in its own right.
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LibraryThing member MSarki
Not only an interesting story, but harrowing and unfair. I do appreciate Annie Ernaux, her honesty and courage, and her need to put her life into words so that others might benefit from how, and the way, she lived.
LibraryThing member thorold
While she was a student at Rouen in the early 1960s, Annie Ernaux became pregnant and was obliged to resort to an illegal abortion, an experience she treated in the context of fiction in her first novel, Les armoires vides (1974). Twenty-five years on from that, prompted by a scare about a possible
She tells us in graphic detail about the things the pregnancy and the abortion procedure did to her, physically and psychologically, and about how the people around her reacted: the friends who helped in practical ways, despite their convictions; men who were turned on by the idea that this was a girl who had evidently had sex with someone else and thus might well agree to have sex with them; the doctors who pushed her away with Catholic distaste, the others who clearly resented her for putting them into an ethical and legal dilemma there was no clean way out of, and the others again who were sympathetic but did little of practical benefit to her, all as a result of a law that put her in danger without in any way achieving its stated objective.
But there are also a lot of other little things that Ernaux takes note of with her sharp eye for social detail, like the body-language of the patients and doctors in the HIV clinic, the films and songs of the time, or the telling detail of the junior doctor in a Rouen hospital who is rude to her when she asks him a question, and later mortified to discover that she is not "some girl from the Monoprix" but a university student. A nurse ticks Annie off for putting the unfortunate doctor in a false position by not revealing her true status: she leaves us to work out for ourselves the (very 1960s) implications that it would have been perfectly acceptable for a doctor to be rude to a working class woman, and that being a student automatically makes you at least an honorary member of the middle class...
This ought to be a period piece, describing an unpleasant but almost forgotten corner of women's lives, but sadly it still seems to be just as relevant as it would have been had Ernaux been brave (or foolish) enough to write it in 1964.
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HIV infection, she decided that it was time to revisit those events in the more direct form of a memoir. She tells us in graphic detail about the things the pregnancy and the abortion procedure did to her, physically and psychologically, and about how the people around her reacted: the friends who helped in practical ways, despite their convictions; men who were turned on by the idea that this was a girl who had evidently had sex with someone else and thus might well agree to have sex with them; the doctors who pushed her away with Catholic distaste, the others who clearly resented her for putting them into an ethical and legal dilemma there was no clean way out of, and the others again who were sympathetic but did little of practical benefit to her, all as a result of a law that put her in danger without in any way achieving its stated objective.
But there are also a lot of other little things that Ernaux takes note of with her sharp eye for social detail, like the body-language of the patients and doctors in the HIV clinic, the films and songs of the time, or the telling detail of the junior doctor in a Rouen hospital who is rude to her when she asks him a question, and later mortified to discover that she is not "some girl from the Monoprix" but a university student. A nurse ticks Annie off for putting the unfortunate doctor in a false position by not revealing her true status: she leaves us to work out for ourselves the (very 1960s) implications that it would have been perfectly acceptable for a doctor to be rude to a working class woman, and that being a student automatically makes you at least an honorary member of the middle class...
This ought to be a period piece, describing an unpleasant but almost forgotten corner of women's lives, but sadly it still seems to be just as relevant as it would have been had Ernaux been brave (or foolish) enough to write it in 1964.
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LibraryThing member CarltonC
Another powerful text from Ernaux, who years after the event recalls the events around her abortion in clear, precise prose.
LibraryThing member akblanchard
Annie Ernaux was in her early twenties when she found herself pregnant with a child she didn't want. She turned her formidable intellectual powers to the best way of putting an end to her problem, but in France in the early 1960s, her options were limited.
Abortion is a somber subject, and this
Abortion is a somber subject, and this
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brief account is not easy to read. I found Annie's singular focus on getting rid of it disconcerting. Still this book is worth reading for its realistic depiction of the dangers of back alley abortions in the era before legalization. Show Less
LibraryThing member RickGeissal
This is a very well-written little book - 95 pages - about the author's hard choice & experience of her abortion decades before while she was in college. The book is filled with pain & a lot of uncertainty about what is real & what is fantasy - a compelling book.
Original publication date
2000