"Naturally I won’t opt for narrative which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it."

I am a longtime fan of Ernaux's pieces, clever bits of memoir and metafiction that convey her particular experience of a moment in time in a way that simultaneously keeps the reader at a distance and has the reader so immersed that it feels as if one is there. This piece is mostly about what we now call imposter syndrome as experienced by Annie, a middle-class girl from the country (a part that sits at the edge of a city.) When she moves to a private boarding school Annie is thrown into everyday life amongst much posher and more cosmopolitan people. The whole is pretty wonderful. The acknowledgment that language is never able to fully embody truth is food for thought, and also leaves the reader a bit off balance. ( )

Annie Ernaux arguably writes "non-fiction novels", but not in the usual sense of the term - the historical events at the centre of her books are the very private, personal events of her own early life, and she writes about the experience of coming back to those events from her current perspective as a mature writer, opening up areas of her memory that many of us would be reluctant to go into.

This book was prompted by the memory of a pivotal day in June 1952 when a row between her parents looked frighteningly likely to get out of hand. It's trivial in hindsight, because nothing serious actually happened, her parents made up their differences immediately afterwards and carried on as normal, but it was of course extremely scary for her at the time, and it was also significant because this was a moment when she realised that there were things in her life that were somehow so shameful that she wouldn't ever be able to talk about them. In the book, she digs into the surroundings of her life in 1952 to get to grips with that feeling of social shame that was closing in on her as a 12-year-old - her parents' café-épicerie, their neighbourhood in a small town in Normandy, the convent school she went to, being an awkward, flat-chested, bespectacled adolescent, what was in the papers and on the radio then, how people talked in patois or "good French", how out-of-place her parents suddenly looked when they had to move out of their usual setting on a holiday trip, and so on.

It's a theme she touches on in other books, of course, and it's by no means unique to her - there are plenty of other writers who experienced at some point the feeling that their working-class background and lack of savoir-vivre somehow made them "not good enough" for the intellectual world they aspired to belong to. But Ernaux is peculiarly good at teasing out the details that make a period and a social setting come to life - you can't really read this without identifying with the narrator and her shame, even if you weren't twelve years old in 1952 and have never visited Normandy... ( )

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/110388041628/shame-by-annie-ernaux

I, so far, have found it rather captivating how Ernaux begins this novel with My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June... and then really never mentions it again, and instead adroitly details a child's life in which we might understand why.

Annie Ernaux certainly identifies with shame, and has since the age of twelve. She carries it with her even to this day. As foreign as this concept may at first seem, and as important as the personal questions are that follow it, her identity, I gather, is based on a connection made between the shame she has carried since the age of twelve and the intensely heightened emotional and physical sensation she experiences to this day through orgasm. Now that is not a slim picking, but rather novel, and written in so few pages. ( )

Zitat Seite 91: „das Schlimmste an der Scham ist, dass man glaubt, man wäre die Einzige, die so empfindet“ ( )