Welcome to Litsy!

In a Dorothea Tanning painting she saw in a show three years before in Paris, a bare-chested woman stands before a row of doors that stand ajar. The title was Birthday. She thinks this painting represents her life and that she is inside it, as she was once inside Gone with the Wind, Jane Eyre, and later Nausea. With every book she reads, To the Lighthouse, Rezvani's Les Années-lumière, she wonders if she could write her life that way too.

They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we'll appear in our children's memories...

Reading in the warm when it's raining outside.

Perfect book for a quiet, contemplative day at the lake.

I loved the writing style of this autobiography, going through the years, highlighting historic events and pop culture. Overviews of the years rather than the nitty-gritty of daily life. The tie-in at the end was well done! #Pop23 ~A book that features two languages (translated from French)

Annie Ernaux is a very original writer. She mixes her own life with collective events. I enjoyed the book sometimes funny other times sad written from her perspective with courageous lucidity. Question for English readers the book is full of French references (history, pop culture, politics) I wonder if you still related to it? For me it was a trip down memory lane, including my parents‘ lives who like Ernaux were teachers.

Wish you all a lot of moments like this in 2023!

Finally an author I‘ve heard and read the books by, win this prize.

Star!🌟🌟🌟
Annie Ernaux has won the Nobel Prize for Literature!

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/oct/06/annie-ernaux-wins-the-2022-nobel-p...

Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in literature! I am slightly surprised (because I didn't take the the rumours seriously 🙄). I do love her work, so I'm quite happy for her, but there are so many other strong candidates out there who were just as worthy and could have used the publicity. She's doing fine: recent abortion news in the US renewed interest in her autofiction novel L‘Événement, which was turned into a film in 2021.
#NobelPrize

2022 Nobel Prize in Literature: Annie Ernaux. I have read none of her work, but she sounds interesting:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/a-memoirist-who-mistrusts-her-own-...

I know I‘ve probably skipped a few letters and will go back.

I thought of this for #LetterY #AlphabetGame

While telling the story of her life Annie Ernaux sketches the half century of French/European/World history. This novels is the key of her "oeuvre". If you like Ernaux's style or auto(socio)biographies, you shouldn't miss this one!

The word “struggle” was discredited as a throwback to Marxism, become an object of ridicule. As for “defending rights,” the first that came to mind were those of the consumer.

I like the way Ernaux includes her writing process for this book within the book itself. Example: “Her main concern is the choice between “I” and “she.” There is something too permanent about “I,” something shrunken and stifling, whereas “she” is too exterior and remote.”

I felt like I was swimming through time in company with Ernaux, who intertwines personal & societal experiences in this memoir/cultural history spanning 7 decades. The voice shifts between “she” for the author & “we” for the collective, managing to be both intimate & expansive. Not every detail (ie French politics) resonated, but I identified strongly with the changing of women‘s lives & the rise of consumerism. #Translation by Alison Strayer.

Television sets were turned in for newer models. The world looked more appealing on the colour display, interiors more enviable. Gone was the chilly distance of black-and-white, that severe, almost tragic negative of daily life.

Under Giscard d‘Etaing we would live in an “advanced liberal society.” Nothing was political or social anymore. It was simply modern or not. Everything had to do with modernity. People confused “liberal” with “free” and believed that a society so named would be the one to grant them the greatest possible number of rights and objects.

Under the spell of media simplifications, people believed in the technological delicacy of bombs, “clean war,” “smart weapons,” and “surgical strikes”: “a civilized war,” wrote Libération.
(Internet photo)

Of all the information we received daily, the most interesting, the kind that mattered most, concerned the next day‘s weather. The rain-or-shine monitors in the RER stations displayed predictive, almanac-style knowledge that provided us with a daily reason to rejoice or lament, thanks to the surprising and yet invariable factor of weather, whose modification by human activity profoundly shocked us.

But for the first time, we envisioned our lives as a march toward freedom, which changed a great many things. A feeling common to women was on its way out, that of natural inferiority.

Only teachers were allowed to ask questions. If we did not understand a word or explanation, the fault was ours.

The USSR disappeared and became the Russian Federation with Boris Yeltsin as president. Leningrad was St Petersburg again, much more convenient for finding one‘s way around the novels of Dostoevsky.
(Internet photo)

With the Walkman, for the first time music entered the body. We could live inside music, walled off from the world.

By their clothing, we could distinguish little girls from young girls, young girls from young ladies, young women from women, mothers from grandmothers, labourers from tradesmen and bureaucrats. Wealthy people said of shopgirls and typists who were too well dressed, “They wear their entire fortune on their backs.”

A book following a female protagonist from the mid-40s until the present day. Through vignettes she looks at her own life, childhood, teens, student, wife and parent, and how these phases was influenced by what happened in France and the rest of the world. She looks at how the private is political and the political private.

5 glowing stars for one of the best books I've ever read!
This is both an autobiography and a biography of France from the 60s onward. In using the collective "we" and the singular "she", Ernaux achieves a fantastic literary feat, blending her history, her generation's history and History, keeping in mind how one plays into the other, but at the same time keeping them neatly separate. The prose is mesmerizing. This woman is a revolution.

#quarantinereadschallenge Thanks @ju.ca.no for the tag! It's been a while since I've done one of these.
1. Too many books! Including the tagged one
2. Could never choose one
3. ⬆️
4. The Illustrated Mum (I only reread as a child/teen)
5. Room
6. If you mean immediately, Ask Again Yes and Baba Yaga laid an egg
7. Wonderland?
8. Recently, Such a Fun Age
9. Only the GR challenge, 60 books
10. Couch, pillows, blanket, tea
11. The Ramona Quimby books!

@jenniferw88 #jennyis30

One more square down! Fantasy is up next 💖

10/15 #jumpstart2020 @Clwojick @Lizpixie

Took me a while to get into this but when I did I loved it. Very individual style and phenomenal translation, telling the story of one woman‘s life from the 60s to the present day and also telling the story of France at the same time. Once I got through the (admittedly odd) first section I just flew through it, really recommend

#readeurope2020 France
#jennyis30 autobiography

#weekendreads @rachelsbrittain

1. Tagged book, the mermaid and Mrs Hancock which is dragging a bit for me but I‘m gonna try and finish, and salt fat acid heat which I love but it‘s so big it hurts my hands to read so I‘m taking it slow.

2. Maybe How To Do Nothing?

3. Yep! Two spider plants and a cheese plant (Mr Cheesy). I got them when me and my bf moved in together and I love them, I‘m working hard to keep them alive

My completed #readingenvysummerreading . Tagged book was my favorite, but they were all very different. Short stories, novel, memoir/essay, history. Settings of rural England, Mexico, France, the Netherlands.

I like the stuff about memory here...

I liked the bits where she looks at photos of her past.

Progress was the bright horizon of every existence. It signified well-being, healthy children, glowing houses, well-lit streets, and knowledge.... In reality cramped housing forced children and parents brothers and sisters to sleep in the same room.... The times, people said, are not the same for everyone.

Amazing “generational memoir”. Ernaux uses her own life (and family, friends) to illustrate the changes in France c1941-the 21st century. From economic changes (a life without indoor plumbing where everything is used through necessity to a consumerist society), to political changes and swings, the waning influence of the Catholic Church and mores, and more. She also discusses the weirdness of aging: it happens when you least expect it lol.

I enjoyed this once I got into the rhythm of it. A mix of personal memoir (but referring to herself in the third person - which distanced & annoyed me at first) & social history. Ernaux uses photos as a jumping off point to track her personal story but branches out to the collective story of her generation (‘we‘) - who witnessed great social upheaval in France from 1940 - 2008. Wry commentary on women‘s issues, clear-sighted. (Up now on the 🎧).

I enjoyed this once I got into the rhythm of it. A mix of personal memoir (but referring to herself in the third person - which distanced & annoyed me at first) & social history. Ernaux uses photos as a jumping off point to track her personal story but branches out to the collective story of her generation (‘we‘) - who witnessed great social upheaval in France from 1940 - 2008. Wry commentary on women‘s issues, clear-sighted. (Up now on the 🎧).

Our new episode is up! Annie Ernaux is a bit of an icon or as (our) @mr_annie puts it, she‘s like ‘a French Helen Garner‘. 🥰
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This is shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize for translated fiction to be announced tomorrow. So... is it fiction? Just one of many tangents we go down in this episode. 😂
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We also chat about Proust 😳 & underlining our books (or not). Do you scribble in the margins? #iwarnedyouthereweretangents

Current read. 📖 #MBI2019

The Years by Annie Ernaux (translated by Alison L. Strayer) This feels very much like a memoir but I‘m glad it is nominated for the Man Booker International prize so more people can experience Annie Ernaux.

#WomenInTranslation #TranslatedLiterature

London #bookhaul . 🤓📚
Have you read any of these?

This book is a revelation in showing ways of looking at how our personal history intersects with our collective history. It focuses on the life of a woman in post-WWII France up till the present but conveys a powerful sense of the dominant ideologies of the time. But it‘s also a profound way of looking at memory and personality. I hope it wins the #MBI2019

Autobiographical novel with interesting POV (with which I had some big problems) is told in snippets, from postwar years till present time. In the foreground is development, progress in the society combined with author‘s personal experiences and thoughts, impact of the society on individual and vice versa. Very well written and very interesting, structured look at one life. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

#ManBookerInternationalPrize #MBIP2019

Not an adventurous literary year for me. 😕
#in2018
@RealLifeReading

Annie Ernaux erzählt ausgehend von ihren Erinnerungen, Fotos und Videoaufnahmen die Geschichte Frankreichs ab 1940. Wunderschön geschrieben und man wird durch die vielen literarischen, theoretischen, Musik- und Filmreferenzen ungemein inspiriert. #readtheyear #frenchliterature #readwomen #suhrkamp

„Es war die Zeit der Schwätzer.“ ❤️ Fantastisch kluge Reise durch die französische Geschichte mit Annie Ernaux. #frenchliterature #readwomem #readtheyear #france