When they heard the news on October 6, they were moved. A few cried. For a literary prize, it was the first time. Decorating Annie Ernaux, 82, with the Nobel Prize in Literature is, in a way, recognizing their discreet lives. “It’s a little bit ours thanks to her”, says Martine Charreyron, 65, a retired civil servant in the Jura. Like her, regarding two hundred readers of the Mondeof all ages and horizons, responded to our call for testimonials on what the books of the French author represent for them: pages that have helped them find their place, words that, for fifty years, have accompanied them in intimate and collective crossings.
“It’s a bit like seeing my grandmother and her dubious French, my girlfriends and their complicated love stories, my former cashier colleagues come into the light”, feels Lucie V. 25 years old, consultant in Paris. From a family ” mean “ from the east, the young woman preferred “to lie, to dream of someone else, to be like those[elle] frequented »and had the impression that his life “deserved to be romanticized”. Annie Ernaux’s books taught her to “to accept oneself”, “to see the beauty in the banality, in the ‘beauf’, in the errors of French in the oral, the fatty dishes, the rap”.
The writer, who participated in the popularization of the expression “class defector” – which offered those concerned to think regarding themselves, but whose overuse annoyed them – put words to this “cloudy fog”l’“uprooting” social migration. Anthony Perronnet, a 28-year-old consultant, found “comfort, tenderness, legitimacy”while he felt “rejected by [s]are two worlds”with ” clothes “ to his urban friends “to have received too much” and to his parents for not him “have given enough”. In the middle, Annie Ernaux as “a friend in this crevasse of solitude”.
“She reconciled me with myself”
Laura Leblanc, 31, agrégé in letters living in Paris, college professor in Argenteuil (Val-d’Oise), tells “the shame of having been ashamed of those who [lui] gave everything: love, trust”. And his “desire for social elevation” born of his readings, recognizing in Empty Cabinets (Gallimard, 1974) “the inability to [s]a mother, housekeeper, to master the subjunctive, the absence of books, the way of eating [s]es parents ».
By recognizing in At Place (Gallimard, 1983) his own father – an illiterate worker, a peasant in his native country –, Bina A., 38, clerk in Seine-Saint-Denis who left school in 2ofunderstood the tensions arising from her marriage to an automobile company director, her feeling of having “betrayed” his. Daughter of a “silent mother forced into silence” dead –, Audrey Pellarin, 48, French teacher, found a “literary mother who [l]‘allowed to speak’.
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