“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.
