{"id":1656,"date":"2020-11-03T16:00:48","date_gmt":"2020-11-03T16:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/?p=1656"},"modified":"2020-11-03T16:00:48","modified_gmt":"2020-11-03T16:00:48","slug":"review-annie-ernaux-a-mans-place","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2020\/11\/03\/review-annie-ernaux-a-mans-place\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Annie Ernaux, A MAN\u2019S PLACE"},"content":{"rendered":"

Translated from French by Tanya Leslie (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020)<\/h2>\n

The release of A Man\u2019s Place <\/em><\/a>makes Annie Ernaux the most published author at Fitzcarraldo Editions: this is the fifth of Ernaux\u2019s books to be published in translation by Fitzcarraldo, with another two scheduled to come next year. A chronicler of personal and historical detail, Ernaux looks back on pivotal moments or relationships with a detached observation that belies deep emotion, and offers a portrait of a particular time, place and milieu that shaped her. In A Man\u2019s Place<\/em>, the subject is Ernaux\u2019s father, a working class countryman who had been taken out of school at the age of twelve to work on a farm and pay his way. Defined when people spoke of him by the fact that he could neither read nor write, he had always wanted his daughter to rise above the \u201chumiliating barriers\u201d of a social situation in which he felt trapped, forever striving for a better life and never quite attaining it. Ernaux\u2019s relationship with him was complex, and A Man\u2019s Place <\/em>represents her attempt to document his life as she knew it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The narrative opens with Ernaux announcing her father\u2019s death, information that she imparts with characteristic understatement: \u201cMy father died exactly two months later, to the day \u2026 It was a Sunday, in the early afternoon\u201d. The earlier event to which Ernaux refers here was her success in the entrance exams to the teacher training college in Rouen: it was a milestone in her life, but she had been unaware that her father was proud of her achievement. She discovers the significance of her success for her father when she looks through his wallet after his death and finds a newspaper clipping of the exam results: the names are listed in order of merit, and Ernaux\u2019s was second on the list. The father\u2019s unarticulated pride is, however, always coupled with a more palpable resentment that his daughter has been able to move \u201cup\u201d, to leave her parents behind, to notice their lack of refinement and in that silent observation to make them realise that she no longer accepts their ways without question.<\/p>\n

This is a story of missed moments and painful silences, written in what Ernaux herself identifies as a neutral style and presented as an endeavour that brings her no joy. Yet the words she chooses to write her father\u2019s story are perfectly pitched to offer both an insight into the hardships of her father\u2019s life and an understanding of her experience of him as a daughter. Emotions were not easily expressed in the household, and this inflects Ernaux\u2019s detached writing style: not only does she describe it as akin to the way she wrote to her parents after she moved away, but also she observes her younger self from a vantage point years later, struggling to recognise in that stranger the person she still harbours inside her (this is even more evident in the wonderful A Girl\u2019s Story<\/em><\/a>, published earlier this year by Fitzcarraldo in Alison L. Strayer\u2019s translation). Even the decomposition of her father\u2019s corpse is presented in a measured way (\u201cWithin a few hours, my father\u2019s face had changed beyond all recognition \u2026 The smell set in on the Monday\u201d). Indeed, the imperative to remain objective is explicitly voiced when Ernaux notes that she had originally thought of writing a novel about her father, but realised that this was out of the question as \u201cin order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Ernaux creates a work that is artistic in an unconventional way: to write a man crippled by fear of saying the wrong thing, she chooses her words with great care and embeds simple refrains from her childhood household in beautifully crafted sentences. She places these phrases in italics, and so they stand out to allow insight into the way her parents thought and spoke. Her parents are \u201cafraid they would lose everything and lapse back <\/em>into working-class poverty\u201d, \u201calways afraid they would eat into their capital<\/em>\u201d, and are haunted by \u201cthis fear of being ashamed, out of place<\/em>.\u201d Ernaux\u2019s father is afraid of what other people will say, of using the wrong words (which would have been \u201cas bad as breaking wind\u201d), of being looked down on; the italicised phrases and the fear they contain are, as Ernaux explicitly notes, inseparably linked to her childhood. Tanya Leslie weaves them admirably into delicate sentences of her own, her careful and lucid translation respecting Ernaux\u2019s understated eloquence. The only thing I\u2019m less convinced about in the translation is the title: the French La Place\u00a0<\/em>is less\u00a0specific, and so the translated title becomes less representative of the book itself. I had similar reservations about the translated title of\u00a0Happening<\/em><\/a>\u00a0(though my quibble there was more that the title diluted the original), and I do think that Ernaux\u2019s titles (with the possible exception of The Years<\/em>) are particularly difficult to translate literally. I\u2019m sure this won\u2019t be a deal-breaker, anyway \u2013 fans of Ernaux will find much to enjoy in A Man\u2019s Place<\/em>, and for those new to her work it will give an excellent introduction to her writing style and preoccupations.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s twenty years since I first read La Place<\/em>, and it was fascinating to read it in translation with a couple of decades of reading and living under my belt. I felt much more empathy towards Ernaux\u2019s father than I remember feeling back then, and the carefully contained and articulated emotion struck me much more than they had twenty years ago \u2013 my over-riding memory had been the depiction of a suffocating home environment and Ernaux\u2019s detachment towards her family. These things, of course, are only part of the story, but that\u2019s how my memory had condensed it (\u201cMemory resists\u201d, writes Ernaux; personal reminiscence is unreliable). Above all, A Man\u2019s Place <\/em>is an emotive goodbye to a man who remained distant from his daughter, a homage born of silences and the inability to find a way to reach one another. Ernaux\u2019s father\u2019s greatest fear was giving his daughter cause for shame; his greatest satisfaction \u201cthe fact that I belonged to the world which had scorned him.\u201d In this touching tribute she creates in her \u201ceducated bourgeois world\u201d a legacy for a man she will never fully know, giving him his place by carving it out in a world from which he always felt excluded.<\/p>\n

Review copy of A Man\u2019s Place <\/em>provided by Fitzcarraldo Editions<\/h6>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Translated from French by Tanya Leslie (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020) The release of A Man\u2019s Place makes Annie Ernaux the most published author at Fitzcarraldo Editions: this is the fifth of Ernaux\u2019s books to be published in translation by Fitzcarraldo, with another two scheduled to come next year. A chronicler of personal and historical detail, Ernaux […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2429,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[43,93,349,365,897],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReview: Annie Ernaux, A MAN\u2019S PLACE - Translating Women<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/translatingwomen\/2020\/11\/03\/review-annie-ernaux-a-mans-place\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Review: Annie Ernaux, A MAN\u2019S PLACE - Translating Women\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Translated from French by Tanya Leslie (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020) The release of A Man\u2019s Place makes Annie Ernaux the most published author at Fitzcarraldo Editions: this is the fifth of Ernaux\u2019s books to be published in translation by Fitzcarraldo, with another two scheduled to come next year. 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