Photograph: Ed Alcock/The Observer
The Nobel prize in literature has, for the past 121 years, traditionally been awarded to novelists, playwrights and poets. There have been one or two philosophers (Bertrand Russell, Elias Canetti) and very occasionally it has been given to writers of non-fiction with an epic sweep – Winston Churchill won in 1953, for instance, thanks to his “mastery of historical and biographical description”.
This year marks a turning point: in awarding the Nobel to the 82-year-old French writer Annie Ernaux, the Swedish Academy has, for the first time, seen merit in a memoirist and announced to the world the public value of private life.
There have been other firsts in the Nobel canon recently: Alice Munro (2013) is predominantly a writer of short stories; Svetlana Alexievich (2015) is a journalist whose “novels in voices” bring together the testimony of others – neither form had been honoured by the prize previously. Combined with Ernaux’s win, these landmarks suggest not only that women in particular are pushing the boundaries of literature but that a certain kind of intimate experience, skilfully conveyed, can have impact on a majestic scale.
All three of these authors focus on what the grand narratives leave out. When Alexievich first tried to publish her magnificent book The Unwomanly Face of War, a Soviet censor told her: “We don’t need your little history. We need the big history.” Many years later, Alexievich’s record triumphed, and now Ernaux’s Nobel puts the nail in the coffin of that censor and his partners in thought: we all need little histories. They’re what literature is made of.
Ernaux began writing – in secret, without her then-husband’s knowledge – in the French tradition of auto-fiction, a term now bandied about beyond recognition. Les armoires vides (1974) and the two books that followed were novels based on her own life, written in a conventional form. The last of these, La femme gelée (1981) was about a married mother of two who has been “frozen” by domestic life. It offered a view of women in society that would preoccupy her for decades and led readers to assume she was talking about herself.
At that point, she made an emphatic switch from fiction to fact: “No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony,” she resolved. She wanted to write about her late father, who had run a cafe in Normandy and from whom she had become distanced partly as a result of her education. Halfway through writing the novel she began to feel “disgust”. A novel, she later explained, was “out of the question. In order to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach.” Instead, she would “collate” her father’s words, tastes, mannerisms, and give an account not just of the man but of his generation and class.
It’s important to understand this about Ernaux’s work: though it is written in memoir form, she features largely as an observer or as a conduit to a shared emotion.
Despite their modesty and precision (many of her volumes run to fewer than 80 pages), the books aim to show something broader than any given self, which is why she is sometimes thought of as an ethnographer or sociologist. In the book she eventually wrote about her father, La place (1983), later translated as A Man’s Place, she admonishes herself: “If I indulge in personal reminiscences… I forget about everything that ties him to his social class… I have to tear myself from the subjective point of view.”
This viewpoint was combined with an extreme attentiveness to, and an erudite knowledge of, literary style. “This neutral way of writing comes to me naturally,” she said. “It is the very same style I used when I wrote home telling my parents the latest news.” La place was the first of her books that she felt was not “false”, and it marked the beginning of a life’s work.
Other volumes were borne of, among other things, terror (her mother’s descent into dementia), desire (a love affair with a married man), physical pain (an illegal abortion), familial pain (the death of an older sister Ernaux never knew), shame, grief and guilt (should she be setting any of this down at all?). “Literature is so powerless,” she writes. And, in Passion simple: “Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things.”
The Years was another project altogether and without a doubt her masterpiece. (It was published in French in 2008 and shortlisted for the International Booker prize in 2019, marking her large-scale introduction to anglophone readers.) In that book, Ernaux’s purpose is not so much to retain a particular moment as to “save [her] circumstance”. The Years is the collective memoir of a generation, an almanac of collaged experiences, words, advertisements, graffiti, clothes, films, habits, beliefs.
Threaded through the text are not only milestones (the end of the war, the birth of the computer, the mobile phone) but things society doesn’t know, or doesn’t say, at the time. She feels she missed out on the civil unrest of May 1968 – she was “too settled” at the time – but is perhaps still a product of it. This sense of being adjacent yet subject to the great sweep of time is The Years’ great, humble achievement.
Three years ago, I visited Ernaux at her home just outside Paris. She told me that the reason she wanted to convey the collective memory of her generation was that women’s lives had changed to a dramatic degree in that time. If I were to look back, she said, starting at the same age as she was when she began, there would not be the same gulf between the present and the past. This is clearly true. Not only that; we are indebted to those women and to her in particular for her account of constrictions, liberations, secrets and lives.
• Gaby Wood is the director of the Booker Prize Foundation
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