notoriousesr 's review for:

Shame by Annie Ernaux

4.25

emotional informative reflective fast-paced

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 In June 1952, Annie Ernaux’s father tried to kill her mother. It was an isolated event never repeated, but it was a turning point for the young writer in her understanding of herself and her family. In Shame, she turns an “ethnographic” eye onto her cultural and familial context to try to explain the events of a Sunday in June that changed her life.

The NYT Book Review was certainly correct in calling this book “careful” and “unflinching” in its specificity. Often, “unflinching” can mean cold and clinical, but Ernaux writes with a great deal of warmth and compassion, even when tackling such a personally difficult subject matter. She tenderly but completely excavates the factors that led to her lingering shame, and how the actual event of her father’s attempted murder of her mother was only piece of a larger jigsaw puzzle of failed respectability. I appreciated that she never came to one certain conclusion or a central “why,” which reflects how life is often without clear answers. The book, which is really more of an extended essay, also manages to be clearly structured despite having no headings, which is a feat in itself. I don’t think it’ll be a lasting favorite of mine, but I give it 4 out of 5 rosaries.