I've wanted to read Ernaux's work for a long time but I hadn't realized how short and episodic her writing is. I could have read a lot more about this affair, which she described so beautifully. ( )

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. ( )

Le jeune homme by Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux is a totally compelling and sweet work of prose. It must be said that it is very short. In my Gallimard edition just 26 pages, but in any standard pocket book it would probably fit on less than 10 pages. But with world-class literature, obviously, length is no criterion.

Annie Ernaux writes from her own experience in a way that is recognisable to a very large readership. I think with this work, Le jeune homme, it helps if you have ever fallen in love with a person more than 30 years younger than yourself, but even if you haven't Le jeune homme can be read and appreciated in various ways. For instance, the book obviously in some ways resembles Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and part of the splendour are slight references to Venice and Capri.

The story suggests that this romance is a folly. There is some element of ridicule in the desire of the young man, and the mixture of seriousness and amusement on the part of the woman.

While the main character in the book is a lover, the story is also a reflective observation of young people. The obvious egoism of the young man is described without really condemning it (or him).

Whether it is justified or not to assume that the author is also the main character, the author suggests that the initiative lies with the woman, as one could say in terminating the relationship, and terminating the story, which could still mean the woman and the author are different people. ( )