Annie Ernaux (Lillebonne, 1940), born Annie Duchesne, today won the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, endowed with 920,000 euros and considered the most important literary award in the world. The announcement was made by Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, in the crowded hall of the institution where, every year, on the first or second Thursday of October, the verdict of the 18 just men (17, this year, due to the death of Kjell Espmark) who make up the jury. He has highlighted "the courage and clinical sharpness" with which the author "uncovers the roots, alienations and collective limitations of personal memory", as well as that "she believes in the liberating force of writing" and her "uncompromising" work. it is written in "plain" and "scraped clean" language. Ernaux, according to the jury, "reveals the agony of the class experience" and describes emotions such as "shame, humiliation, jealousy or the inability to see who you are", with which he has achieved "something admirable and lasting".
"There is practically no fiction in most of my books, just a few name changes," Ernaux told this newspaper three years ago, when he received the Formentor award. "I did it fully to talk about my father. That book, 'El lugar' (1983), was something immense for me, a reparation, I felt that I was doing the most important thing that can be asked of writing. To avoid miserabilism ( pity the dominated) or populism (saying they are wonderful), there was only one option, a writing of the facts, factual. I was going to use my father's words, those with which he expressed his condition, he was not going to speak me". Later, he portrayed his mother in 'Una mujer' (1989).
Her readers know that being a woman hurts, and they feel the close author like a family member. They have accompanied her, throughout her books, helping in the grocery store-bar of her parents, they have seen her flirt with her boyfriends, they have attended her first time and the summer camps her. They also know the horrors of which their father was capable, they have been shaken by the scene of her clandestine abortion, and they have also read the books she read, they have followed her in her sexual conquests and in her change of social class to marry a right-wing bourgeois. They have lamented her gray marriage, they have smiled at some of her lovers, and they have been moved by details of her motherhood. They have seen, next to her, how she paraded the entire 20th century and part of the 21st, politics, songs, customs, technology.
The narrator and protagonist of Ernaux's books resembles the author: she is, in her words, "a more impersonal 'feminine self', which supposes a way of taking distance and observing oneself as if it were someone else, which does not allow strictly speaking of autofiction".
"I have suffered silence and condescension," she explained, "this is a women's book." My books didn't sell for decades. With "Pure Passion" (1992), feminists came after me, others called me "horny." ' No man who wrote that would be so disqualified."
In 'The Event' (2000) she narrates her abortion, "just as I experienced it: how the fetus comes out dripping and falls into the sink. This is not a nice thing, you can't say 'I had a false birth.' What does that correspond to, physically, the experience? To what extent are the words of men fatiguing? It is not a mental experience, it is a bodily experience. Millions of women have done that since the world is world. My method is to tell things as they are, stripping them of the condescending gaze of the ruling class".
In 'The Years' (2008), we see the entire French society parade over the decades, with a prose that imitates the flow of memory, with free associations of ideas or images.
In 'Memoria de chica' (2016) she recounts her life before her last name was Ernaux, "that girl who disappeared one night in August in a vacation camp, is a before and after. Sexuality can be seen as something simple but, to For me, sex is never something simple, it is always complex and transforms you".
This woman, who joined the bourgeoisie by marriage (she considers herself "a class turncoat", is part of the 'yellow vests' "and I understand violence, sometimes they feel like killing the other. Like when the doctor they I bled to death after having an abortion in a flat, he insulted me and then, seeing that I was a university student, he apologized, as if speaking like that to a supermarket cashier was justified". He believes that the 'yellow vests' protests "have been a deep reaction, a response to the system from the base, but which, not being directed by any union or political party, has been brutally disavowed, searching with a magnifying glass for any person, among them, who had traits of anti-Semitism or misogyny and magnifying it".
Of Macron, he believes that "he spends the day showing how cultured he is. Mitterrand and Chirac were widely read but did not boast about it. Of course, no interest in culture is reflected in his government's budget."
The jury has decided between five finalists, whose names remain secret for fifty years, according to the strict rules of the Swedish Academy.
In the last editions, the winners were the Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah (2021), the American Louise Glück (2020), the Austrian Peter Handke (2019), the Polish Olga Tokarczuk (2018) and the British Kazuo Ishiguro (2017). The 2018 prize was awarded the following year, since the Nobel Prize for Literature had to be suspended due to a large-scale scandal, which led to the resignation of several members of the jury: the case of Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of an academic, who he abused his power, raped and harassed several women, raised funds from the Nobel Foundation, leaked names of winners, and allegedly got rich betting on the winning horse. For three years, the waters have been returning to their course.
