A review by polytropos
O acontecimento by Annie Ernaux

fast-paced

4.0

I have rid myself of the only feeling of guilt in connection with this event: the fact that it had happened to me and I had done nothing about it. A sort of discarded present. Among all the social and psychological reasons that may account for my past, of one I am certain: these things happened to me so that I might recount them. Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations 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.


I really don't want to give into cliches so early in my text, but I suppose there are few adjectives in English besides candid that can describe this book. Annie's narrative is a no holds barred portrait. Like a half buried memory that suddenly and vividly grips you, she goes straight to the point in a clinical manner: I got pregnant in the Sixties, I had an illegal abortion and between these two facts fear, expectation, revulsion and frustration were my closest companions.


It's in this undaunted vein, she never shies away from portraying the voyeuristic and ultimately ineffective gaze of her bourgeois colleagues, the weight of her unwanted pregnancy on her own class-slash-reproduction perceptions ("Somehow I felt there existed a connection between my social background and my present condition. [...] neither my baccalauréat nor my B.A. in liberal arts had waived that inescapable fatality of the working-class — the legacy of poverty — embodied by both the pregnant girl and the alcoholic. My ass had caught up with me, and the thing growing inside me I saw as the stigma of social failure."), the profound pain and violence she endured and the seeping dread of living through the ultimate feminist realisation: you don't have the final say over your own body and future as a woman, the Law, the State and the Sacredness of the Family have ownership over it instead.



Parallelly, I've been skimming through Patti Smith's own memoir and the difference between the two authors' views on memory and retelling is marvellous. While Patti might lean towards a more fictional and poetic approach, Annie's ethos towards Literature and her journeys into the past are well documented: "Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself. ", she declared in Shame/La Honte (1998). And while this, for sure, might contrast a bit with my own approach - especially regarding the boundary between reality/fiction in autobiographies and the eternal gap/labour of translating those memories into words and written imagery - I feel like this view is what gives Annie's writing her characteristic frankness and makes me admire her work even more. She knows the place memory has in human life, and wields her words and stories like a scalpel: shamelessly cutting, exposing and shedding light on the innermost brick layer of the roads she threaded in her existence.
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