Ernaux is an excellent, precise writer, but after reading A woman's story this was much too repetitive. Her perceptions of the character representing her father is interesting, but how well does a child really know a parent? ( )

(Read in French)

Started without knowing what the subject matter was, picking up the book because of Ernaux’s recent Nobel Prize win. Sort of serendipitous to read this book after Becker’s Denial of Death.

The story of the narrator’s (Ernaux’s?) father speaks to what Becker says in his book about every person searching for a sense of heroism in life to cancel out their fear total oblivion in death. In depicting an absolutely typical life in the mid 20th century, Ernaux also shows the way one can reproach others for not living up to the heroic ideal. Our parents are probably the most important people in our lives, indeed we wouldn’t have a life without them. But as we struggle in young adulthood for a sense of actualization, searching for the thing that will give our life meaning, we can be stumped and even angered by our parents inability to live up to the heroic ambition we set for ourselves, and to the outsized role that they previously held in our childhood. This can especially be true if we “surpass” our parents, as the narrator seemed to feel in her youth, and her father even seemed to believe himself, concerned as he was about his accent, social class, etc.

The magic power of art is by merely paying attention to something and imbuing a depiction of that thing with meaning, the artist helps us see parts of life that we couldn’t before. In this rather dry record of her father’s life, with all its mundane frustrations and dissatisfactions we are able to see the meaning of a life devoid of heroism; a life that most of us, our ancestors, and the vast majority of all the people ever born, fall into. What Ernaux could not have foreseen 40 years ago when she published this book, is that she was already well on her way to accomplishing a feat of heroism that would put her as close to the echelons of immortality as anyone could hope for. The irony is that by sacrificing one’s dreams and ambitions to provide for your children in the hopes that they will one day surpass you, you seal yourself out of the world you hope they will one day inhabit. ( )

AFTER reading a WOMAN'S STORY, the author writes about her father after he dies. again, she is very cold and no warm feelings. she tries to write as if she wasn't involved, but she is the daughter! ( )

Ernaux has a gift for telling the story of a person, of a time, without the dishonest nostalgia most people seem to think necessary. It makes me crazy how people think it is necessary to dehumanize the dead by speaking of only what the speaker considers the good things. This is so judgmental! This is what I think is good so this is what we will discuss. This is honest and each reader can absorb the information and will think whatever she thinks of the man presented.

Ernaux's father was a man who sacrificed, who wanted to better for his child, and then resented the ways in which she grew through education and exposure to an easier less primal life. Rather than actually trying to learn he steamrolls over what he would characterize as bourgeois pretension but which is really just manners and an interest in the actual world as it exists in the moment. My own father did the same, and now that I have an educated new adult of my own I have to make a conscious effort to not just lean back into the "in my day" arrogance of age, and rather to allow myself to learn from him (which is how I grow as a person rather than aging into a relic, and which allows me to feel the joy of my child's accomplishments.) None of that means he was not a good man. He was a coarse man who loved his family and worked hard and who generally did not let his resentments get in the way of civility, it is just who he was. Once again Ernaux paints a very full portrait of a man in very few pages, a portrait which embraces things relatable to many while very specifically describing one very idiosyncratic person, and also illustrates the growth and chance of the pre and post war periods in Europe, allowing us to see a France long in the past. Lovely. spare, haunting. ( )

This blend of fiction and memoir begins with a death: the author/narrator's father, sixty-seven, passes away soon after she passes her examinations to become a teacher. What follows is a reflection on her father's life, their relationship, and her thoughts on the process of writing the narrative itself.

For whatever reason, I had built this up in my head as a difficult story. It's not, in fact. The story is spare and simple, an outline of an ordinary life as seen through the eyes of a daughter who sometimes recounts how her father felt as a working class man breaking into the middle class and always feeling a little backward, and other times illustrates how they didn't understand each other at all. It reads like a memoir written when the loss of her father was fresh, but is framed as somewhere between fiction and nonfiction and, according to the last page, was written from November of 1982 to June 1983. I'll be sure to read the companion work, A Woman's Story, soon. ( )