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A review by alec_turestreichquartett
L'événement by Annie Ernaux
4.5
Beautifully written. Straight to the point. It made me physically ill throughout reading, which took place on the two LNERs I took from Durham to London this evening. Though I was also quite hungover and sick today, so I’d like to think it wasn’t solely my male fragility. Seems trivial to bring up in the face of such a fantastic novel, but one thing struck me as odd. Ernaux (very justly) points out the weak female characters of the French literary canon (“femmes abstraites, médiatrices entre l’homme et le cosmos” p. 49), and also fails to see the slight parallel with the way she (very frenchly) reduces the young black man with the Walkman at p. 12 and 14 to foreign, unimportant, similarly devoid of agency, other. This false step being the only one I could remember from the entire book speaks well of it.
In the tube back home, writing this review amongst the late night London crowd, I feel (as always) somewhat seul contre tous. Suffocated by hostile strangers who seem to know exactly who I am and what I’ve done. I see something of that sentiment in the words of L’événement, one I’ve unconsciously translated to all my writings up to this point, which was warm to see in this new context.
In the tube back home, writing this review amongst the late night London crowd, I feel (as always) somewhat seul contre tous. Suffocated by hostile strangers who seem to know exactly who I am and what I’ve done. I see something of that sentiment in the words of L’événement, one I’ve unconsciously translated to all my writings up to this point, which was warm to see in this new context.