When future ethnographers want to study what it was like to be a woman in Europe in the decades between the second world war and today, they could do worse than pick up the collected works of Annie Ernaux, who this week became the first female French writer to win the Nobel prize in literature.
Ernaux already describes herself as “the ethnographer of my own life”, yet she has also always insisted that she is an author of fiction rather than memoir. Such is the power of her personal observation that some wrongly regarded her as a historian of her own life. Far from being a writer of the me-me-me school, her gift to literature has been to find the collective in the particular. Her unstinting recreations of her own experience, from working-class origins, have faced down many of the big taboos, from sexual desire and illegal abortion to cancer and dementia. Less solipsistic than Simone de Beauvoir (one of the Nobel’s great misses), she nevertheless followed her in anatomising the rise of the feminist consciousness and the many challenges it has faced along the way.
She has just turned 82, has been publishing for nearly 50 years and has long been feted in France, where she is one of the few female authors to appear on school curriculums. The extraordinary thing is how long it has taken the anglophone world to catch up. Despite a flurry of translations around the turn of the millennium, it was only in 2019, when her masterpiece The Years (Les Années) was shortlisted for the International Booker prize, that she began to be widely noticed.
The usual response to such a situation is hand-wringing about the parlous state of translated literature in English, and it is certainly not coincidental that she is published not by one of the big players but by a small independent press. She has given the publishing house Fitzcarraldo its second Nobel prize win in four years, following on from Poland’s Olga Tokarczuk. More startlingly, however, as Fitzcarraldo also now publishes Elfriede Jelinek and Svetlana Alexievich, the imprint has close to a 25% share in the 17 women to have won since 1901.
It is to this bigger picture that Ernaux belongs. The jury praised her for “the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Her work is part of a European tradition of autofiction that has since produced Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgård and her young compatriot Édouard Louis.
The rubric of the Nobel prize calls for “outstanding work in an ideal direction”. For all their differences, all four of Fitzcarraldo’s laureates are profoundly political writers who play by their own rules. In Ernaux’s case this has involved pushing the innermost experience of women out into a man’s world. Though it would be unwise to overclaim the significance of her win, it suggests that the notion of “an ideal direction” may just be shifting. And about time too. At a time of renewed crackdowns on women’s rights in so many parts of the world, any increase in the visibility of the fearless Ernaux can only be a good thing.
