Young man / Event
Two crucial chapters in the life of a pioneer of autofiction
As a student, she had her child taken, as a professor, she aroused outrage. The formative experiences of a famous pioneer of the auto-fiction genre, translated into two extraordinary novels.
"If we experience something, whatever it is, we gain the inalienable right to write about it. There is no partial truth. If I don't spell out my experience in full, with all the trimmings, I'm contributing to the obfuscation of reality, in which women live, and support the world, in a male-dominated world."
This premise has guided the acclaimed French writer throughout her life, resulting in unique literary works such as the world-famous The Years or the prose poems The Young Man and The Event. In the first, the fifty-year-old author tells of a love affair with a man thirty years her junior that allowed her to return to the days of her own youth. In the second, she uses diary entries to return to 1953, when, as a desperate twenty-three-year-old college student, she had an illegal and traumatic abortion. In both cases, he recounts these events with a distinctive style, stunning candour and enviable insight.
Two chapters from the life story of a Nobel Prize winner in literature, presented as intimate dramas with social overtones. The novella The Event was the basis for the film of the same name, which won the Golden Lion 2021 for Best Film at the Venice IFF.
They wrote about the book:
Ernaux writes with a clear, controlled precision that feels both vivid and devastating when read. It connects the pain and undignified nature of her experience with social class, power and patriarchy.
- The Guardian
"In France, Ernaux, with his characteristic style and approach to literature, is an institution and has long held his place in the canon of twentieth-century literature. Paradoxically, a younger generation of writers, such as Édouard Louis, who were strongly influenced by them, made their mark here earlier."
- Reviewer
"He has an amazing talent for demonstrating many things by writing about his own life: the world at the time, the mood of society, the differences in class origins, the position of women, the limitations of their power, and at the same time the premonition (or germ) of their emancipation."
- Daily N
Annie Ernaux
(* 1940)One of France's most important writers, now considered a living classic, grew up in the small Normandy town of Yvetot, where her parents ran a colonial and a bistro. She studied pedagogy and modern literature, which she later taught at high school and university. The author, who is now considered a leading exponent of the popular genre of auto fiction, has written more than two dozen books based on her own life. In 2017 she received the Marguerite Yourcenar Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 1995, a pair of prose pieces from the 1980s, The Place and The Ordinary Woman, which she dedicated to her late father and mother, were published in Czech. Among her best-known titles are The Years (2008), nominated for among others. for the International Man Booker Prize. Host Publishing House published them in Czech in 2022, not long before the writer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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| Code: | AK1F934 |