"Her work readily offers the general contours of her life: a working-class, Roman Catholic childhood in rural Normandy; an unwanted pregnancy and abortion before the procedure was legalized; her failed marriage and various affairs; and relationships with her family, especially her parents."
From the NYT presentation of information about the new Nobel Prize writer, Annie Ernaux.
Have you read her? Will you read her? Does that description make you more or less likely to read her?
It makes me less likely to read her. She's praised for "precision" and for offering "general contours" — which sounds contradictory. And we're told she writes about herself and given a list of what seem to be ordinary woes of womanhood. Is there some reason for this dull presentation?
I wonder if the NYT editors considered not taunting us with the phrase "before the procedure was legalized." Obviously, we're hearing about the legality of abortion in France. But the idea that there is only a before and an after has plainly been disproved by the American experience. We had the time before the procedure was legalized, then the time when it was not only legalized but enshrined as a constitutional right, then the time when it is legal or not legal depending on which side of which state line you're on, and the general contours of the right/crime of abortion continue to morph.By the way, how legal is abortion in France? Only in the first 14 weeks. In fact, abortion is legal even in the third trimester in 6 of the states in America.
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She sounds a little slutty to me but this would not affect my decision not to read her work.
I have the internet for that.
"She is a writer dedicated to re-examining her past and cataloging her humiliations and anxieties with precision."
It's good she decided to write books instead of writing for the NYT or NYmag. She would've stood out like a needle in a stack of needles.
she's a lefty who takes up for a terrorist who murdered an american attache in 1982, who is vehemently anti israel, and voted for the communist melanchon,
she might be qatar's choice,
https://www.jpost.com/bds-threat/article-719059
Honest question -
Wouldn't surgical abortion have been relatively high risk for the Mother before the development of antibiotics in the 40's and 50's and considering the medical capabilities of the time? And wouldn't this risk have had an influence on the legality of the procedure(s)?
"It makes me less likely to read her."
Ditto.
An abortion, and infidelity? Wow, she's really countercultural. And then ... she writes about herself? How strikingly original.
Now, if she were the first non-binary Latinx Cherokee writer to win the Nobel, she might be worth reading.
Snark aside, does anyone care about the Nobel for literature anymore? It seems to have gone the way of the Oscar, and the Time Person of the Year. No one cares except the journalists, and the professional enclave from which the winner is chosen. The Novel for medicine and the hard sciences may still have credibility.
And don't even get started on the "peace" prize. My guess is it goes to Zelensky.
It's nice that Ernaux's more or less normal messy life didn't keep her from writing some apparently good books, but there's nothing particularly unusual in the quoted bio, so I agree--why dwell on it so much? Does the Times not realize it's unremarkable?
I'm reminded of an obituary they ran years ago of some upper west side dilettante (I might have read it here), where they gushed over her courageous political ideals, and then went on to list them in what turned out to be a list of completely normal, boring, safe, and fully predictable opinions for a resident of the upper west side. Sometimes Times writers are so in love with their own vision of themselves as dangerously iconoclastic that they fail to understand how colourless and unimaginative they are.
Of course they merely said that abortion is legal in France. The last thing they want is for their readers to understand the nature of that legality.
Nobel, not Novel, obviously.
Je ne pense pas. La vie est trop courte.
The writers lately are getting more and more obscure. No more Camuses, Sartres, Gides left.
I am reluctant to defend the NYT, but I think the meaning of that sentence is carried by the "easily".
Perfectly reasonable to write precise, detailed descriptions, framed in an easy-to-grasp context as described.
No, what bothers me is the "precise". In biography, I want accuracy. I don't care how carefully, precisely, you write your fantasy memories. Unless it's shelved in Fiction.
Sounds like her works are all real page-turners.
That abortion angle you bring out fits a recurrent theme of Scott Adams - the news organizations fail us. Very few people know how restrictive abortion is in Europe and that seems important context - especially when Macron slammed the judgement I just wonder if the news orgs are so in their bubble they can't see the context - or if they're consciously creating narratives.
She sounds like a Loser.. In EVERY Aspect. If i want to read about LOSERS, i'll read my own writing
Althouse: "Does that description make you more or less likely to read her?"
Over the last 20 years, on vacations I have discovered the delights of binge-reading John Updike. Since his work could easily be described in similar terms I would have to admit "less likely" for most of my adult life, but now? Maybe more likely to give her a shot. What I have taken from Updike is, it's all in the craftsmanship, especially when it comes to seeing the beauty in the ordinary.
(And don't get me started on the question why no Nobel in Literature for Updike, which may well be related to the fact that it's a French chick getting the award.)
HELL! she's not even a good loser!
Getting a nobel prize is NO WAY to lose! She couldn't even do that right!
I like memoirs and memoirish fiction, if nothing else to learn about other places and times and would never otherwise experience.
Never heard of her so I don't know if I'd read her. I've read a lot by Collette and de Beauvoir so it's not like I'm incurious.
style in one is somewhat like dos passos
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-year-i-tore-through-annie-ernaux-e2-80-99s-books/ar-AA12IlvD
The Nobel announcements may make you want to read something, but the feeling passes pretty quickly. There is always a website to visit or a sandwich to eat.
The description of Ernaux's work reminds me of Michel Leiris, who was always writing quasi-autobiographical books like Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility. I didn't read any of them, even when I was a reader.
Two main contenders now are probably Elsa Morante and Karl Ove Knausgård. Knausgård is Scandinavian and writes in the same autobiographical vein, but he has the Hitler thing (six novels with the collective title My Struggle). Morante is a woman and her works are more human and relatable.
Rushdie is another possibility. Murakami. It would be quite a surprise if Michel Houellebecq won, though he is the only French-language writer now with anything like the fame that French writers had in the last century.
Of course I will not read her. She's a Nobel prize winner.
You can find her work in the rack behind the hallmark cards directly next to the paperback romance novels with Fabio on the cover. She tried booking him for her work, but Fabio didn't want to be associated with the 'humiliation and anxiety' genre. She could only afford Verstegui anyway...
Criminy, except for some science fiction, I don't read anything made in the last 75 years or so. . . .
And, I dunno, 'Nobel' doesn't really impress me anymore.
this was the best they could do,
https://newrepublic.com/article/168036/annie-ernaux-nobel-literature-laureate
I am resolved to read several I have not read over the years or read a bit and want to read more:
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1928
Sigrid Undset
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1948
Thomas Stearns Eliot
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1949
William Faulkner
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1954
Ernest Miller Hemingway
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1962
John Steinbeck
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1970
Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1980
Czeslaw Milosz
"Have you read her? Will you read her? Does that description make you more or less likely to read her?"
No.
No.
Less, to the point of no likelihood.
"cataloging" — that's also vaguely disparaging.
I've never heard of her and this just about guarantees I won't read her. It sounds like the same mush that comes out of so many academic writing programs that gets good reviews and no sales in the U.S. On the other hand, as a bit of a francophile, it's nice to see a Frenchwoman getting the honors
"she's a lefty who takes up for a terrorist who murdered an american attache in 1982, who is vehemently anti israel, and voted for the communist melanchon," If Narciso is right I will set aside my francophile inclinations. On the other hand if she's stylistically like John Dos Passos I'd be a little interested in reading her. Decisions, decisions
that was my take on her historical overview, as to her stylings, it's as mediocre as some of the booker prise selections,
honestly the reviewers don't do her any favors,
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/26/bad-genre-annie-ernaux-autofiction-and-finding-a-voice/
Consent and safe sanctuary are implied with the first choice. Don't be liberal with the "benefits, ladies. Don't be a splooge stooge h/t Althouse, gentlemen.
I'll read her after I finish Bob Dylan's "Big Book of Songs and Poetry".
The Nobel prize long ago went from a prize biased toward Leftists, to an Affirmative action prize, to a complete joke. I used to wonder how the hell did Saul Bellow or Joe Brodseky win - but those guys were literary Giants compared to Louise GLuck or Alice Munro.
From reading her Wiki page, the current winner seems like a good author who writes the kind of books I have zero interest in reading. Or more accurately, I have a list of 100 fiction books that I want to read, and another 200 I want to re-read first. Her type of book is at the bottom of the list. When I get through those, I'll give her a shot. Should be in 2030.
Shocking thing is the Nobel Prize gave an award to someone who is Anti-Israel. They've been known in the past for their philo-semitism.
I've always wanted to read French Literature in the original french. I keep meaning to improve my French reading skills to do that, but laziness and the real world keep getting in the way. Maybe when I retire, i can do that. And read her.
Wouldn't surgical abortion have been relatively high risk for the Mother before the development of antibiotics in the 40's and 50's and considering the medical capabilities of the time? And wouldn't this risk have had an influence on the legality of the procedure(s)?
All the early feminists were appalled by abortion, precisely because so many women died from the procedure (or became sterile, which was a common side-effect).
There was no "right to an abortion" in human history. All the theories about the unborn baby's life came up in the context of criminal prosecutions of men for beating the shit out of pregnant women in the street. The question was whether you charged these men with murder for causing a miscarriage, or something less-than-murder (assault inflicting serious injury, for instance).
The left has literally manufactured a fantasy-history that abortion has been safe forever.
The historic abortion method in pagan times was swallowing a poison and hoping you didn't die. That was so likely, the pagans adopted a kill-the-newborn policy instead.
Hippocrates was so appalled by the baby-and-woman-killing practices of his culture that his Oath specifically forbids abortion and assisted suicide.
When the Supreme Court wrote Roe v. Wade, they said there could be no protections for women having abortions in the first trimester. It was to be "an abortion free of interference from the state." The Court even said you couldn't require a licensed doctor.
First trimester abortions done by non-doctors can and do kill women
After Roe v. Wade, the number of women dying in abortions skyrocketed for a couple of years, until the Supreme Court finally said that states could require that an abortion doctor was a licensed physician. It took the Supreme Court almost two fucking years to fix that particular mistake.
Finally, after O'Connor (the first woman) hit the Supreme Court, she dragged some of the men over to the recognition that it might be a good idea for states to guard the health of women in abortion surgeries. So Roe v. Wade was partially overruled in 1992.
But just because states had the authority to inspect abortion clinics for health purposes, that doesn't mean they did it. In Pennsylvania, there were no health inspections of abortion clinics for years and years. That's how Kermit Gosnell operated for so long, killing newborns (and a woman or two).
There's also an increase in suicide risk in aborting women. I can't prove this, but I suspect that a large number of abortions are coerced by fathers. Feminists almost never talk about this. In their narrative, abortion is a thing that only affects women. And yet every pregnancy has a baby, and every pregnancy has a father. (The suicide rate in China went sky-high among women who were forced to abort).
I suspect abortion is also to blame for the rapid rise in ectopic pregnancies and premature births. There are studies that suggest abortion might add to your risk for breast cancer.
Spiral, season 5, episodes 1 and 2, Captain Laure boards a train from Paris to Holland for an abortion after the French 12 week limit, but gets off the train before it leaves. (My source says 12 weeks). So abortion laws are a script writers' device for showing ambivalence towards having a baby.
list of what seem to be ordinary woes of womanhood.
The Griefs of Women
The griefs of women are quiet, rustle
like crinoline or whisper like
the tearing of old silk;
hum like appliances, give off the sharp sweet smell
of burnt out motors; tap like typewriter keys.
The strengths of women are quiet,
but hardy as the weed that finds its cranny
between the concrete block of the sidewalk
and the concrete slab of the wall, and grows there,
and blooms there.
Men are bums.
We're really better than they are.
Brand X Poetry "The Griefs of Women" after Adrienne Rich
I read the article. The article doesn't make her sound especially appealing, but neither is she especially off putting. According to the article, she supported the me-too movement but had nice things to say about how her childhood rape had positively influenced her development as a writer. She's apparently not completely PC.....Long ago, I read Pearl Buck. She won a Nobel. I guess she's aged poorly, but fortunately no one reads her and she doesn't have to be cancelled. Nobel winner Knut Hamsun was an admirer of Hitler and is Norway's greatest writer. How awkward for them.....Maxim Gorky was nominated five time but never won. Perhaps his admiration of Lenin and Stalin was a hindrance. It wasn't PC back then to be an outright Communist. Maybe they can strip Hamsun of his title and posthumously award it to Gorky.
No and no.
Sometimes, a think-piece is just a stink-piece.
No, no, less. I don't think I would be entertained.
"It makes me less likely to read her."
Same here.
"we're told she writes about herself and given a list of what seem to be ordinary woes of womanhood. Is there some reason for this dull presentation?"
That the work itself, and perhaps the person, is dull?
Anyway, we practitioners of the hermeneutic of suspicion know the main reason for the award and its "presentation": they didn't want to give it to the best modern French novelist, the one whose work will still be read a century from now, Michel Houellebecq.
"In fact, abortion is legal even in the third trimester in 6 of the states in America."
I appreciate the blank statement of that striking fact. No need to answer, it's more a general question for abortion supporters, but does it bother you at all?
Again slightly OT: would it be fair to say that most of us regular readers of this blog have read more from Althouse than from the last 10 Nobel winners combined?
There was no "right to an abortion" in human history.
This is sloppy and over-broad, my bad.
There was no "right to a safe abortion" in human history.
Women often died in abortions, along with their babies.
Women were second-class citizens for most of human history.
The pagans allowed abortion, even as it killed a lot of babies and women.
There was no anesthesia until the 19th century. So "elective surgery" wasn't a thing. That's why you're not going to find anything in the Federalist papers about aborting pregnancies.
Here's what abortion was like in 1972.
Looking over the list of Nobel Prize winners for literature, the last one that I actually read was Gunter Grass, who won in 1999. I read him in college, for a German history course.
Bob Dylan doesn't really count, since I almost never read his lyrics, but rather listen to them. And if we're going to open up the category of "literature" to include song writing, there are plenty of others who I think deserve the prize before some of the non-entities on the list.
There are names I recognize from the 2000's (Naipaul, Munroe, Pinter, Lessing) but I confess I have not read them.
If anyone here wants some comedy, read the snippets on the official Nobel Prize page (NobelPrize.org) for the reasons why the winners were chosen. A sample:
Abdulrazak Gurnah “for his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents”
Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”
Peter Handke “for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”
Olga Tokarczuk “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life”
Kazuo Ishiguro “who, in novels of great emotional force, has uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world”
Yeah, right. Whatever.
@rcocean,
"I've always wanted to read French Literature in the original french."
Reminds me of this:
https://youtu.be/zVeJ5F26uiM
They also gave the prize to a guy for writing Blindness.
"right to an abortion"
Two or more enter the clinic, one, probably, leaves. The military industrial complex is probably salivating at Planned Parenthood performance under an umbrella of human rites. No life or sanctuary for you. Demos-cracy is aborted in darkness. h/t WaPoo
Kazuo Ishiguro
V. S. Naipaul
Are pretty good novelists. Some of the other Award winners since 2000, might be good too. Particularly the Chinese/Eastern Europe/Russian ones.
But giving it to Dylan make the prize into a joke, and Harold Pinter? Good grief. You wonder how Arthur Miller or Paddy Chayefsky missed out. Probably anti-semitism.
Less likely. That list is tiresome now. To clutch the breast over having been raised Roman Catholic (Quelle horreur!) bespeaks a shallowness.
rcocean,
"I've always wanted to read French Literature in the original french. "
Start with Soumissuon".
After that, only Raspail will seem sufficient.
I am woman, hear me squeal.
"Her work readily offers the general contours of her life: a working-class, Roman Catholic childhood in rural Normandy; an unwanted pregnancy and abortion before the procedure was legalized; her failed marriage and various affairs; and relationships with her family, especially her parents."
I've never heard of her. Why in the world would I give a shit about any of the things she's writing about?
If she were someone who I was pasionately interested in because of other things, the topic might be of interest. Since not, not
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