Tavia Gilbert
1) Getting lost
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation...
2) Happening
Author
Language
English
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Description
"In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she...
3) Shame
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Translation of a French memoir in which the author discusses her father's attempt to kill her mother years earlier, and ponders the impact of the incident on the rest of her life.
Author
Language
English
Description
"A Woman's Story is Annie Ernaux's "deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon her mother's death from Alzheimer's, Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to "capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris." She...
Author
Language
English
Description
A French girl starts out in life with ambitions to have a career, but she also wants love. Love leads to marriage, children, and in no time she is a harried housewife. A study in the conflict between a woman's need to be desired and her need to fulfill herself in a profession. A novel written in defense of all who are expected to put others ahead of themselves. By the author of Simple Passion.
6) Exteriors
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Taking the form of random journal entries over seven years, Exteriors captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris. Poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive.
Author
Language
English
Description
"In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, Annie Ernaux revisits the night 50 years earlier when she found herself submerged and controlled by another person's desire and willpower. It is the summer of 1958, the year she turned 18. And then the man she gave herself to moves on. She has submitted her will to his, and now she finds that she is a slave without a master. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and...
Author
Language
English
Description
Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her 2 year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference.
Author
Language
English
Description
An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter's attachment to her mother, and of both women's strength and resiliency. "I Remain in Darkness" recounts Annie's attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer's disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman's gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. "I Remain in Darkness" is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with...
10) A man's place
Author
Language
English
Description
"A daughter must come to terms with her formative years as she writes an unflinching portrait of her father, a cafe owner whose life has become very alien to her."--