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Loading... The Young Man (2022)by Annie Ernaux
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This is an autobiographical essay about a brief affair that the generally sublime Ernaux had with a former student when he was in his 20s and she in her 50s. It is no more than a diary entry with some added commentary from Ernaux justifying the fling. Men do it all the time she says as she pretends not to mind the attention they garner from onlookers or the way younger women talk to her boytoy as if she is not there. I don't judge her for the fling any more than I judge men who do the same (which I totally do.) The man was not a child and not her current student so have at it, even though it seems rather sad to me. The whole was less than a half-hour read, so I am not angry about wasting time. I didn't dislike it but it did not feel at all substantial which is not something I have ever before said about Ernaux's work. ( ) If you've just won the Nobel, your publishers are going to print pretty much anything you send them, it seems, even if it's only a 6000-word story you've had in the cupboard for a couple of decades and now want to issue as a standalone book. Definitely my shortest prose text of the year so far, coming in at 38 rather small pages... ... But it is Annie Ernaux, short books are part of what she does, and of course it's a book that's tied up in complicated ways with her own life and with at least two of her other books. And it's well worth reading just for itself, too. The narrator describes how, in her mid-fifties, she has an affair with a man in his twenties, a student at the University of Rouen, where she had been an undergraduate herself, before he was even born. She tells us how the relationship gives both of them a great deal of pleasure, in bed and elsewhere, how it makes her feel younger, and how much she enjoys introducing him to social and cultural pleasures outside his normal range. She discusses the disapproving looks they get when they appear in public together, and how there seems to be a unique level of disapproval reserved for the older woman-younger man combination: they speculate about how no-one would have given them a second glance if the age difference had been the other way round, or even if they'd both been men. She also digresses a little bit into older woman-younger man relationships in books and films, but she doesn't allow herself to get too distracted by this (there are so many classic French novels where an ambitious young man arrives in Paris and has to serve his time as lover to a middle-aged society hostess before he can take up his true calling and desert her for a young heiress...). So, it's all good fun and no-one is getting hurt, but we have already had a hint on the opening page that the narrator is at least to some extent exploiting her lover for literary ends: soon it becomes clear that what is really going on is that her weekend idylls on the mattress of her lover's student room are part of a mechanism for unlocking her memories of the clandestine abortion she had to undergo when she became pregnant as a student in 1963. Ernaux had already assigned that experience at arm's length to a fictional character in her novel Les armoires vides (1974), but it only seems to have been this relationship with the young man A. that brought her to the point where she was ready to deal with that horror in detail and in the first person in L'événement (2000). I will never get enough of Annie Ernaux’s work. In this extremely short, 35 minute, audiobook, Ernaux tells the story of her whirlwind affair with a student, 30 years her junior, when she’s in her 50s. In him, she feels herself to be both ageless, and also aged. She’s drawn to him, sexually, of course, but he also reminds her of her own working class beginnings and her time as a student. The affair is a strange kind of time travel, and it puts her in a dream like state of repetition and memory. Annie Ernaux always manages to speak frankly and objectively about her own actions, motivations, flaws, vulnerabilities, cruelties, etc. She subtly explores the power dynamics at play, and also the ways in which she is viewed by society in regards to the “coupling”. The way that she, as an older woman with a younger man, is looked down on for a perception of “incest”, and the subsequent hypocrisy of the reality if their roles were reversed. Thank you so much to NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to yet another of Annie Ernaux’s works. I’m always blown away by her storytelling and have really enjoyed the narration by Tavia Gilbert as well as the translation by Alison L Strayer. I feel that Ernaux’s work has so much to teach me, as a woman, as a human, and as the teller of my own story. I loved it. no reviews | add a review
"The Young Man is Annie Ernaux's account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time- together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the "scandalous girl" she once was, but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing. It was first published in France in 2022"-- No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)844.92Literature French and related languages French essays 1900- 21st centuryLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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