Scan barcode
A review by theecraigeth
A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux
4.0
A Man’s Place opens into the death and funeral of author Annie Ernaux’s father, a worker-cum-grocery store and café owner and “a man who had never done anyone any harm”. In a wonderfully economical but sympathetic prose, Ernaux tells the story of her father’s life, exploring his aspiration towards an unattainable bourgeois respectability that his rural working-class origins, his language, his mannerisms, and the shame he feels about his class, will not allow; but that his daughter is able to achieve through her education. The shame he feels about his class, however, creates a gulf between him and his daughter. He desires more than anything for her to climb the social ladder, but he feels deeply insecure when his better educated daughter corrects his language, or tells him the right way to behave. Ernaux writes that it was her father’s greatest wish that she enter the ranks of the middle-classes, but also notes that he ‘constantly feared–or maybe hoped–that I would never make it.”
it is also clear that the author has inherited her father’s shame about his class, when she invites her friends to stay, her father goes out of his way to be welcoming and kind. His kindness. however, for a middle class girl, having friends visit is no special occasion, and the author’s father’s efforts to honour his daughter’s friends instead “only managed to show he was inferior.” The author is ashamed of her father’s class in much the same way he is.
As a result, the author and her father grow apart. They are unable to communicate with one another. It is with her mother that the author communicates when she is in Switzerland with her husband or when she attains her teaching license. His father expresses his love through the provision of food, and when they talk, they are restricted to the same topics they spoke about when she was a young girl. In achieving her father’s goals for her, the professional job and the middle-class respectability, they become strangers, but he remains, after all, a man who “had never done anyone any harm”.
it is also clear that the author has inherited her father’s shame about his class, when she invites her friends to stay, her father goes out of his way to be welcoming and kind. His kindness. however, for a middle class girl, having friends visit is no special occasion, and the author’s father’s efforts to honour his daughter’s friends instead “only managed to show he was inferior.” The author is ashamed of her father’s class in much the same way he is.
As a result, the author and her father grow apart. They are unable to communicate with one another. It is with her mother that the author communicates when she is in Switzerland with her husband or when she attains her teaching license. His father expresses his love through the provision of food, and when they talk, they are restricted to the same topics they spoke about when she was a young girl. In achieving her father’s goals for her, the professional job and the middle-class respectability, they become strangers, but he remains, after all, a man who “had never done anyone any harm”.