A Man's Place

After the death of her father Ernaux decides to write his biography and looks back on her relationship with him. And while the biography itself is interesting enough, it is the class lens through which Ernaux filters everything that makes this book so good: her parents are decidedly and proudly working class (farming stock, but they operate a café and a small grocery store), while she herself has gone on to enter middle class. That filter adds a layer of melancholy as the class distinction precludes full understanding -- neither her father nor Ernaux herself would want to walk in the other’s shoes -- and I thought it really elevated the book into Proper Literature. Good stuff.

This blend of fiction and memoir begins with a death: the author/narrator's father, sixty-seven, passes away soon after she passes her examinations to become a teacher. What follows is a reflection on her father's life, their relationship, and her thoughts on the process of writing the narrative itself.

For whatever reason, I had built this up in my head as a difficult story. It's not, in fact. The story is spare and simple, an outline of an ordinary life as seen through the eyes of a daughter who sometimes recounts how her father felt as a working class man breaking into the middle class and always feeling a little backward, and other times illustrates how they didn't understand each other at all. It reads like a memoir written when the show more loss of her father was fresh, but is framed as somewhere between fiction and nonfiction and, according to the last page, was written from November of 1982 to June 1983. I'll be sure to read the companion work, A Woman's Story, soon. show less

(Read in French)

Started without knowing what the subject matter was, picking up the book because of Ernaux’s recent Nobel Prize win. Sort of serendipitous to read this book after Becker’s Denial of Death.

The story of the narrator’s (Ernaux’s?) father speaks to what Becker says in his book about every person searching for a sense of heroism in life to cancel out their fear total oblivion in death. In depicting an absolutely typical life in the mid 20th century, Ernaux also shows the way one can reproach others for not living up to the heroic ideal. Our parents are probably the most important people in our lives, indeed we wouldn’t have a life without them. But as we struggle in young adulthood for a sense of actualization, show more searching for the thing that will give our life meaning, we can be stumped and even angered by our parents inability to live up to the heroic ambition we set for ourselves, and to the outsized role that they previously held in our childhood. This can especially be true if we “surpass” our parents, as the narrator seemed to feel in her youth, and her father even seemed to believe himself, concerned as he was about his accent, social class, etc.

The magic power of art is by merely paying attention to something and imbuing a depiction of that thing with meaning, the artist helps us see parts of life that we couldn’t before. In this rather dry record of her father’s life, with all its mundane frustrations and dissatisfactions we are able to see the meaning of a life devoid of heroism; a life that most of us, our ancestors, and the vast majority of all the people ever born, fall into. What Ernaux could not have foreseen 40 years ago when she published this book, is that she was already well on her way to accomplishing a feat of heroism that would put her as close to the echelons of immortality as anyone could hope for. The irony is that by sacrificing one’s dreams and ambitions to provide for your children in the hopes that they will one day surpass you, you seal yourself out of the world you hope they will one day inhabit. show less

A short, beautifully clear and (superficially) simple analysis by a daughter of the way she perceives and perceived her father's life, across the generation- and class- gap that divides them.

The father was a Normandy peasant boy, born before the First World War, who has managed to work his way up to become the proud owner of a small café-grocery; the daughter has grown up in the forties and fifties to go to university and become a teacher of literature, and thus automatically middle-class, with quite different tastes and values from her working-class parents. Her obvious admiration for her father's toughness and determination is mixed up with her guilt about the patronising element that comes into her view of his attitudes and show more aspirations. And of course it's all complicated by her memory of the affectionate moments they shared in her childhood, and her sadness at witnessing his illness and death. Superb writing, and a topic I found very interesting because there are so many echoes there of the way people of my parents' generation related to their working-class parents. show less

Ernaux has a gift for telling the story of a person, of a time, without the dishonest nostalgia most people seem to think necessary. It makes me crazy how people think it is necessary to dehumanize the dead by speaking of only what the speaker considers the good things. This is so judgmental! This is what I think is good so this is what we will discuss. This is honest and each reader can absorb the information and will think whatever she thinks of the man presented.

Ernaux's father was a man who sacrificed, who wanted to better for his child, and then resented the ways in which she grew through education and exposure to an easier less primal life. Rather than actually trying to learn he steamrolls over what he would characterize as show more bourgeois pretension but which is really just manners and an interest in the actual world as it exists in the moment. My own father did the same, and now that I have an educated new adult of my own I have to make a conscious effort to not just lean back into the "in my day" arrogance of age, and rather to allow myself to learn from him (which is how I grow as a person rather than aging into a relic, and which allows me to feel the joy of my child's accomplishments.) None of that means he was not a good man. He was a coarse man who loved his family and worked hard and who generally did not let his resentments get in the way of civility, it is just who he was. Once again Ernaux paints a very full portrait of a man in very few pages, a portrait which embraces things relatable to many while very specifically describing one very idiosyncratic person, and also illustrates the growth and chance of the pre and post war periods in Europe, allowing us to see a France long in the past. Lovely. spare, haunting. show less

Letteratura per adulti. Solo chi ha vissuto un po' comprende appieno, a mio parere, il significante della scrittura della Ernaux. Come per Gli Anni, la prosa è a-emozionale, scevra da qualsiasi sentimentalismo, una cronaca. Ma, nonostante questo, arriva come un coltello conficcato in un panetto di burro, fino in fondo all'anima.

In questo racconto, la Ernaux parla di suo padre, della sua vita costantemente volta all'essere all'altezza, a non essere da meno, al non trovarsi in situazioni di disagio nei confronti di chi sa e ha di più e racconta il rapporto con questa figlia che già da subito saprà di più e con il tempo avrà anche di più.
Un ritratto senza giudizi apparenti, senza affetti strappalacrime, ma di una verità e purezza show more che non ho ancora incontrato in altri scrittori. show less

This could have been an exploration of how education disenfranchises you from your roots, from your parents, but instead this short book concentrates on trying to describe her father’s life as objectively as possible.

I thought to myself “One day I shall have to explain all this.” What I meant was to write about my father, his life and the distance that had come between us during my adolescence. Although it had something to do with class, it was different, indefinable. Like fractured love.”

Written in 1983, this attempt at a purely factual biography of Ernaux’s father (born in 1899 in Northern France) is written in short anecdotal sections of a few paragraphs. It attempts to illuminate why he was extremely class conscious, show more dwelling on the material context of his life, his work and living conditions.
Ernaux’s father starts working at 11 as a farm labourer, looking after dairy cows and helping out at harvest. He is conscripted towards the end of the First World War, although there is no mention of this, other than lifting his ambitions above being a farm labourer, so that he subsequently goes to work in a factory, rather than returning to the farm. He marries and saves sufficient to be able to open a grocery shop, although this is managed mainly by Ernaux’s mother, as Ernaux’s father continues to work in various jobs, in time becoming a foreman.
Ernaux’s father is too old to be conscripted at the beginning of the Second World War, so becomes a full-time shopkeeper, and at the end of the war, moving back to his old village where they also run a cafe next door to the shop, the two ground floor rooms of their house.
Ernaux articulates her father’s fear of not maintaining the status he had achieved, his fear of poverty and fear of using local patois, rather than correct French, with using incorrect language being the greater fear. This concern, or fear, resonates with me, as my mother who was a farmer’s daughter (contemporary with Ernaux, but who left school at 15 to help on the farm), married a middle class bank clerk, and has two “voices”, more colloquial with her family and farm friends, and a posher voice when speaking with other mothers in our village.
Although Ernaux is mainly objective in her description of her description of her father’s life, she makes her subjectiveness intrude several times to provide a framework against which to contemplate her father. I found this description of someone who is afraid of being “found out” to be compassionate and believable, with acceptance of his improved place in society perhaps having been fulfilled through his daughter’s academic achievement, allowing some happiness before he dies, aged about 68.
This is not a romantic memoir, it is an honest attempt to report a life, and to acknowledge that such an attempt at objective reportage, whilst recording the facts, might also be a betrayal of the life her father wanted to present.

Epigraph: ‘May I venture an explanation: writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed.’ —Yūko Tsushima show less