“My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” So begins Nobel winner Annie Ernaux’s latest book to be translated into English, describing a single, savage incident witnessed by the author in childhood. It seems to have had no precedent, nor any repercussions, not chez Ernaux anyway. But anyone familiar with this extraordinary writer’s oeuvre – all those unsparingly astute excavations of self – will already have grasped that this is not the point.
This incident takes place shortly after mass when Annie is 12 years old. It features an especially ferocious argument between her parents, a cellar beneath the family cafe and, chillingly, a scythe used for cutting firewood. Yet ultimately – and perhaps even more darkly – both parents soon brush it off. “I didn’t do anything to you,” the father assures the mother. “Come on, it’s over,” the mother says to her “crouching” and terrified child. “You’ll breathe disaster on me” is what, more pithily, the child remembers telling her parents.
A dramatic choice of words for a 12-year-old, but it’s this very “breathing” – her complicity in a denial so contagious that it might indeed be inhaled – that is at the core of this short yet undeniably powerful book. Though impatient with a term such as “childhood trauma”, Ernaux admits that the incident was “like a veil that came between me and everything I did”. In the months or years that followed, she lost concentration, had trouble with lessons, even lost her “insouciance and natural ability to learn”. Indeed, the event proved so riven with bad omens for her that for a long time it remained “frozen inside me, an image empty of language”.
So does this book – exceptionally deft and precise, the very epitome of all that language can do – indicate a thaw? Again, she sidesteps this. By refusing to “opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it”, the author (in her 50s when she published it in 1996) instead decides to “carry out an ethnological study” of herself at that time. What follows is a surprisingly tender evocation of a bright, passionate and self-aware young girl growing up in her parents’ “cafe-haberdashery-grocery” in a small town in Normandy.
It’s 1952 and the town – referred to merely as “Y” because naming it will make it “swallow me up” again – is still recovering from the devastations of war. The cafe is open from seven in the morning till nine at night and, thanks to the shop’s layout, there is “no privacy whatsoever” between the customers and the family. The urinal in the courtyard is “a barrel surrounded by planks”. Ernaux – who attends private school, itself a source of shame, though ultimately her salvation – does her homework sitting at the top of the stairs under a single lightbulb.
Meanwhile, the sense of looming “disaster” that began in the cellar continues. Escorted home late one night by a favourite teacher and several classmates, Ernaux is mortified to be greeted at the door by her mother in a nightgown that is “creased and soiled” because “we would use the garment to wipe ourselves after peeing”. Later, forced on a package tour to Lourdes with her father, she finds she has none of the right clothes or shoes, didn’t bring enough food, and has to endure him telling a “dirty story about a priest” and hear the others “give a forced laugh”.
This is the meat of Ernaux’s ethnology. Yet even as she writes, the author insists on calling its very purpose into question, in the process even threatening to undermine her own so-called “study”. “The fact that I have put it into writing does not make it any more significant,” she doggedly declares, adding that “after evoking the images I have of that summer … there is no understanding, only this feeling of shame that has fossilised the images and stripped them of meaning”.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. This is classic Ernaux: just when we think we’ve grasped whatever it is that she has chosen to lay out before us, she snatches it away. Indeed, it’s sometimes tempting to wonder whether the very energy of her writing stems from this impulse. Certainly she has no particular interest in making sense of things, in making herself – or us for that matter – any more comfortable or closer to an understanding.
Does that matter? I finished the book feeling, as I’m sure she wants us to feel, that understanding is an overrated process, merely an ersatz moment of empathy. What matters more is the digging itself, the self-scrutiny, the process. It comes as no surprise that the book’s final sentence is every bit as direct and provocative as the first. It seems to contain a tease, even possibly a sly prediction of the future – or maybe nothing at all.
Nonfiction by Julie Myerson is published by Corsair (£9.99)
• Shame by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie) is published by Fitzcarraldo (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
