Product Description

The author of A Woman's Story portrays a daughter coming to terms with her formative years as she writes an unflinching portrait of her father, a cafe owner whose life had become very alien to her.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1132916 in Books
• Published on: 1992-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 99 pages

From Publishers Weekly
"May I venture an explanation: writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed," says Jean Genet in the epigraph to Ernaux's "autobiographical narrative" about her relationship with her father. The betrayer is Ernaux herself, a cultivated intellectual whose bitter resentment towards her petit bourgeois parents first appeared in her novel Cleaned Out . The betrayed, of course, are her parents, without whose efforts the disparity in stations would not have existed. Although not as painfully immediate as Ernaux's depiction of her mother in A Woman's Story , this is nonetheless an affecting portrait of a man whose own peasant upbringing typified the adage that a child should never be better educated than his parents. Ernaux uses, as she says, "no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony," but rather a dispassionate narrative to describe her father's climb to the relative prosperity of a shopkeeper in a small Norman town, and his fretful vigilance lest his manners, language, posture--or daughter--betray his uneasy social position.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A companion to A Woman's Story ( LJ 4/1/91), the biographical novel of Ernaux's mother, this work is a narrative of the life and death of her father. It is a story of a working-class man who believed that self-denial, hard work, and careful speech would gain him entrance into the middle class where good manners, well-spoken words, and respectability reigned. Ernaux tells the story without sentimentality, conveying the alienation and pain of the humiliating limitations of class. Possessing the honesty, perceptiveness, and universality in A Woman's Story and Cleaned Out ( LJ 12/90), this book will make readers glad that Ernaux was able to unravel her suppressed memories, no longer surrendering to a world "where memories of a lowly existence are seen as a sign of bad taste." For public libraries.
- Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
An austere but poignant account from acclaimed French writer Ernaux of those ties that bind as well as separate fathers from daughters, in this companion volume to last year's A Woman's Story. Ernaux expands on personal experience to reflect universal themes of generational and class alienation, of grief at a parent's loss, and of the evanescence of memory, in what she has called an ``autobiographical narrative.'' As she describes her father's life, she comes to accept his recent death and his ``legacy with which I had to part when I entered the educated, bourgeois world.'' Her father, son of Normandy farmhands, managed to struggle up from cowherd--the lowest rung in society--to become a tenuous member of the working class. With his wife he ran a small cafe and grocery store, an increasingly marginal business as supermarkets moved in but viable enough to send his only daughter to a private school. It was a life permeated from the beginning with fear of poverty and shaped by stark prescriptions: ``The only way to escape one's parents' poverty was not to impregnate a woman''; ``You don't have ideas when you are in trade''; ``never lay oneself open to criticism--for what are people going to say?'' Her father is a man who's remembered for childhood outings to the circus and beach, but also a figure, a country man at heart, from whom she grew irrevocably away. ``Books and music are all right for you. I don't need them to live,'' he told her--yet at the end his ``greatest satisfaction, possibly even the raison d`etre of his existence, was the fact that I belonged to the world which had scorned him.'' An unsentimental portrait of a man loved as a parent, admired as an individual but, because of habits and education, heartbreakingly apart. Moving and memorable. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

A stylistic tour de force
This thin book contains a "fiction"--it is shorter than a novella, but somewhat long for a short story. Perhaps one might call it a fictionalized memoir. In experience and scope it is a novel, that is, after one has read the lean 99 pages, one feels that one has experienced an entire life, such is the effect of Ernaux's distinctive prose. She writes: "I shall collate my father's words, tastes and mannerisms, as well as the main events of his life...No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral style of writing comes to me naturally." (p. 13)

This book, and the companion volume, A Woman's Story, was a best seller in France and has become part of the national culture. What Ernaux has done and does so well is to bring to vivid reality the mundane details of the small town life of twentieth century France. Her style is deliberately "flat" without any striving for effect. There is no satire, and as she intends, no irony, no higher view; indeed the nameless first person narrator, whom the reader must take as Ernaux herself, makes no effort to romanticize any aspect of her story including the part she herself plays. She reveals herself as a creature of her culture and her class just as surely as her father was.

She is a secondary school teacher, apparently in her thirties, something of an incipient intellectual, with a two and a half year old son and a husband who also has nothing in common with her unschooled father. The story begins when her father's death at age sixty-seven goads her into recalling his life and her relationship with him. They are two people joined in blood but apart in both a social and a temporal sense. And this distance is part of what she explores. She speaks of something "indefinable," that had come between them during her adolescence, "something to do with class...Like fractured love." Perhaps we might call it the alienation of generations. He was proud of her because she was accepted by those who would not accept him. She had risen from the working class to the middle class, just as he had risen above his father's station as an illiterate peasant.

There are some intriguing curiosities. For one, the blurb identifies Ernaux as having grown up in the small town of Yvetot, while the narrative uses the quaint transparency "Y-" to identify the town, as though this were a roman a clef. For another, there is a sense of something resembling warmth between her and her father, but no more than that, and this "distance" is never really accounted for except as some inexplicable fact of life. Also, Ernaux's narrator thinks of herself as bourgeois and having risen above the station of her working class parents, yet they are totally bourgeois themselves; indeed more so that she, since they own their simple cafe and store and adjoining property in the small town, while she is the equivalent of a civil servant, her education paid for by the state so that she could be employed by the state. This ingenuous self-revelation persuades us of her honesty and guilelessness and lends a queer sort of very deep veracity to her story.

I will not call this a masterpiece, although I think all writers of fiction ought to read it for the magic of its style. She has quite a nice touch, without artificiality, without contrivance.

Tanya Leslie's translation of the French, often tested because of the large number of idioms used by Ernaux, is natural and very agreeable.

Also published under the title "Positions"
Positions or A Man's Place is an account of Ernaux's father from his beginnings on a Normandy farm, his military experience, his working in a factory, marrying, raising a child, and owning a small store. In short, his was the life of a "common man", a man unwilling to put on airs for his daughter but proud of her achievements. On the otherhand he was proud of speaking French not the local patois of his parents. It is the detail Ernaux chooses that develops a picture of the man: "...but in front of educated people he would remain quite or would pause in mid-sentence, adding 'You know what I mean,' with a vague gesture of his hand, willing the other person to finish the sentence for him." A wonderful book to read to see how a character can come to life on paper.

A touching look at a father-daughter relationship
Anyone who has ever felt a distance between themselves and a parent will be moved by Ernaux's life story told in the context of her relationship to her father. The book is an account of Ernaux's childhood in a small French town where her parents owned a grocery store/diner. As Ernaux grows up and attains a higher social status, the gap widens between her father and herself. Ernaux leaves the home, gets a teaching degree and eventually has to come back when her father begins to die. Ernaux's writing is simple and direct; she never overanalyses, she simply presents what she recalls as best she can. This book has a genuine quality that renders it very moving, for everyone has regrets about the way he/she treated his/her parents, and Ernaux's attempt to repent or reconcile is easy to relate to.