Opinion Nobel Prize for literature: Annie Ernaux turned the art of the memoir into a political act of record and rebellion

Turning the odds against the bookies yet again, this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature recipient is the French memoirist Annie Ernaux, whose visceral exploration of the self and its potential implications on social and political life has long made her a champion of, what French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted after her win, “the collective and intimate memory” of France. Yet, Ernaux, 82, does not speak only for her nation. In recent years, with the availability of translations of her most well-known works, she has been “discovered” with equal felicity in the English-speaking world, a testament to the universality of the feminine experience and the popularity of memoir as a genre.

The memoir that Ernaux writes, however, is quite unlike the mellow reminiscences of a fulfilled life. The Nobel citation lauds Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Stripped of all poetry, her prose is spare and journalistic, leached of emotional excess, examining from the vantage point of hindsight the events that had shaped her — her hardscrabble early life in a Normandy town; the fire in her belly to be more; her relationships with her parents, husband and lovers; the acute sense of ignominy and inadequacy induced by gender and class barriers, and the inevitable scuffle with age and ailments. Quite early in her literary career, Ernaux had abandoned the seductive allure of fiction, choosing instead the shifting sands of truth. Potently aware of the infidelity of memory, Ernaux embraced the rigours of an ethnographer as she went about deconstructing her past in works as profound as A Man’s Place (1983), A Woman’s Story (1987) or Shame (1996), eventually abandoning the subjective “I” in her 2019 International Booker Prize-shortlisted and much feted, The Years, for the third-person collective of “she”. In the process, over a career spanning well over five decades, Ernaux would turn the art of the memoir into a political act of record and rebellion, that married a sociologist’s curiosity with an archaeologist’s diligence.

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There is a reason why the real lives of people at a particular place during a particular period make for interesting reading. It allows the reader to go into the murky depths of messy lives and find succour. It offers healing and hope, but also an awareness of history and one’s place in its ranks. Ernaux’s triumph lies in exhorting her readers towards this moment of collective lucidity to the circumstances of their own experiences to find out where they come from and what makes them who they are.