A female friend who has impeccable reading taste told me she was reading Annie Ernaux’s book, Simple Passion, a diary account of Ernaux’s affair with a younger man, and that Ernaux had won the Nobel Prize.
I hadn’t heard of her but was intrigued, and found myself reading several Ernaux books this summer, including The Young Man, being the novella about the same affair with the eponymous young man. This one, though, A Man’s Place, a memoir about outgrowing Ernaux’s lower middle-class background and her relationship with her father, is particularly strong.
The prose is simple, honest, and powerful. It made me cry.
Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection.
Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family…
I was in Greece, and read the Odyssey by and on the wine dark sea, imagining that it was all real.
This is the Anthony Verity translation for Oxford University Press. I have read Fagles’s translation, too, which everyone raves about, but the Oxford classic editions have great notes, which help you appreciate the text. And they are smaller to pack.
'Tell me, Muse, of the man of many turns, who was driven far and wide after he had sacked the sacred city of Troy'
Twenty years after setting out to fight in the Trojan War, Odysseus is yet to return home to Ithaca. His household is in disarray: a horde of over 100 disorderly and arrogant suitors are vying to claim Odysseus' wife Penelope, and his young son Telemachus is powerless to stop them. Meanwhile, Odysseus is driven beyond the limits of the known world, encountering countless divine and earthly challenges. But Odysseus is 'of many wiles' and his cunning…
This epic World War II novel reads like Tolstoy’s War and Peace crossed with Solzhenitsyn’s exposes of Soviet Russia, which may sound off-putting, but Life and Fate is one of the most powerful and compelling novels I have ever read.
Based around the pivotal WWII battle of Stalingrad (1942-3), where the German advance into Russia was eventually halted by the Red Army, and around an extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, and their many friends and acquaintances, Life and Fate recounts the experience of characters caught up in an immense struggle between opposing armies and ideologies. Nazism and Communism are appallingly similar, 'two poles of one magnet', as a German camp commander tells a shocked old Bolshevik prisoner. At the height of the battle Russian soldiers and citizens alike are at last able to speak out as they choose, and without reprisal…
