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jpmatt's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
fast-paced
4.5
libraryofshamsie's review against another edition
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
4.75
4.8 stars* filled with emotion unlike and unimaginable to what she was actually experiencing, or "steady flow of unhappiness", happening by annie ernaux turns her happening to writing then that writing becomes happening (as said by michel leiris). ernaux's voice is deep and sharp, while still writing a memoir that draws the line on her emotions. as she recounts the time before, during, and after her abortion in a time when it was illegal, her writing presents a different experience that rarely speaks on her feelings. ernaux writes, "the distress I experienced on recalling certain images and on hearing certain words is beyond comparison with what I felt at the time: these are merely literary emotions; in other words, they generate the act of writing and justify it's veracity." and yet, the unhappiness and anger and pain that still presents in this work is still felt, and at times it felt even more amplified because of the fact that it drags through its entirety.
4.8/5 ✩ happening is my first ernaux, and i must say she exceeded my expectations. the writing made me feel detached yet so entwined with this time of annie ernaux's life. it was a frustrating and melancholic experience to read this; to imagine living through this is scary. i can hear and feel the anger and pain, even though it's not explicitly stated nor is it written. it's a moving, yet short, true experience on a woman who's paging through her past to learn how a certain moment shaped her present and future self.
"I want to become immersed in that part of my life once again and learn what can be found there. This investigation must be seen in the context of a narrative, the only genre able to transcribe an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me."
4.8/5 ✩ happening is my first ernaux, and i must say she exceeded my expectations. the writing made me feel detached yet so entwined with this time of annie ernaux's life. it was a frustrating and melancholic experience to read this; to imagine living through this is scary. i can hear and feel the anger and pain, even though it's not explicitly stated nor is it written. it's a moving, yet short, true experience on a woman who's paging through her past to learn how a certain moment shaped her present and future self.
"I want to become immersed in that part of my life once again and learn what can be found there. This investigation must be seen in the context of a narrative, the only genre able to transcribe an event that was nothing but time flowing inside and outside of me."
maurynee's review against another edition
5.0
Ce livre devrait être lu par tout le monde. Pas seulement les femmes. Tout les américains devraient lire ce livre. Ils se rendraient peut être compte qu’interdire l’avortement ne va pas faire que les moyens de contraception vont être plus respectés ou que les femmes vont garder leurs bébé. Ce livre montre que interdire l’avortement c’est aussi le faire devenir clandestin !
kipepeo's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Another school read, very intense, very beautiful, incredibly realistic, this was a short but powerful memoir about the author’s experience getting an illegal abortion. She navigates memory in the telling, acknowledging her past way of experiencing it and her current way of remembering it.
lizalu's review against another edition
5.0
"Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensation and my thoughts to become writing, in other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people" (92).
kavreb's review against another edition
5.0
Who’s afraid of Annie Ernaux?
Not the first person to wonder that, and certainly you could brainstorm a list. For one, anybody creeped out by vivid descriptions of trying to DIY an abortion with a sewing needle.
But you'd be missing out. Not the gory parts, but this is vital stuff (even the gory parts). Like Ernaux herself writes, while abortion may be legal at the time of writing, it doesn't brush away the real experiences of women from when it wasn't legal - and like America has shown us (yet again in another dark example) a freedom fought for and gained can easily be taken away again.
This is the experience of one such young woman, as terrifying as it is informative, and with the awareness gifted by writing about it 35 years later, a quietly intelligent portrait of a person and of her time. While much more subjective than Ernaux’s masterpiece The Years, here Ernaux takes her body and, as she says (in a way), gives it to us, so that we could see and know of a time that once was, and in many places still is.
There’s a role for men to play as well here, as there obviously is, even though you wouldn't be at fault for missing it considering how aloof so many of us approach it, both before and after conception. Too often in Happening though that is the whole role - apologetic detachment, or insensitive curiosity. I'm just a story to them, it dawns on Ernaux, and what my situation can do for them. She's not a person, not really - but in patriarchy which woman is?
It is a story of hope and feminist rage, a friend told me. The feminist rage is obvious from every arrow slung at the system that sends desperate women to under-furnished two-room apartments in poor neighbourhoods of a person a friend’s friend knows, looking for liberation, setting themselves down the possible path of untimely death (every challenge made ten times worse if they also had participated in the sin of being born to the working class). The hope may be more difficult to come by.
But you can still see it - in the aid given by a person you never expected to but who through teared-up face held you aloft through an indescribable night whatever their personal beliefs, or in the reluctant help of the people whose conscience won't allow them to just say no, or the person who gave because they wanted to, or, first and most of all, the survival and the strength of the will with which one tackles a dehumanising sexist system and comes out the other side a bigger person.
Annie Ernaux bled and suffered, and with beautifully succinct and empathic prose she shared it all for those back there and us in the here and now and the future to be.
The story never ends, and the fight is always just around the corner. Read on, ye mighty, and let's fucking making it better.
Not the first person to wonder that, and certainly you could brainstorm a list. For one, anybody creeped out by vivid descriptions of trying to DIY an abortion with a sewing needle.
But you'd be missing out. Not the gory parts, but this is vital stuff (even the gory parts). Like Ernaux herself writes, while abortion may be legal at the time of writing, it doesn't brush away the real experiences of women from when it wasn't legal - and like America has shown us (yet again in another dark example) a freedom fought for and gained can easily be taken away again.
This is the experience of one such young woman, as terrifying as it is informative, and with the awareness gifted by writing about it 35 years later, a quietly intelligent portrait of a person and of her time. While much more subjective than Ernaux’s masterpiece The Years, here Ernaux takes her body and, as she says (in a way), gives it to us, so that we could see and know of a time that once was, and in many places still is.
There’s a role for men to play as well here, as there obviously is, even though you wouldn't be at fault for missing it considering how aloof so many of us approach it, both before and after conception. Too often in Happening though that is the whole role - apologetic detachment, or insensitive curiosity. I'm just a story to them, it dawns on Ernaux, and what my situation can do for them. She's not a person, not really - but in patriarchy which woman is?
It is a story of hope and feminist rage, a friend told me. The feminist rage is obvious from every arrow slung at the system that sends desperate women to under-furnished two-room apartments in poor neighbourhoods of a person a friend’s friend knows, looking for liberation, setting themselves down the possible path of untimely death (every challenge made ten times worse if they also had participated in the sin of being born to the working class). The hope may be more difficult to come by.
But you can still see it - in the aid given by a person you never expected to but who through teared-up face held you aloft through an indescribable night whatever their personal beliefs, or in the reluctant help of the people whose conscience won't allow them to just say no, or the person who gave because they wanted to, or, first and most of all, the survival and the strength of the will with which one tackles a dehumanising sexist system and comes out the other side a bigger person.
Annie Ernaux bled and suffered, and with beautifully succinct and empathic prose she shared it all for those back there and us in the here and now and the future to be.
The story never ends, and the fight is always just around the corner. Read on, ye mighty, and let's fucking making it better.