A Man's Place Review

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A Man's Place ReviewThis thin book contains a "fiction"--it is shorter than a novella, but somewhat long for a short story. Perhaps one might call it a fictionalized memoir. In experience and scope it is a novel, that is, after one has read the lean 99 pages, one feels that one has experienced an entire life, such is the effect of Ernaux's distinctive prose. She writes: "I shall collate my father's words, tastes and mannerisms, as well as the main events of his life...No lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony. This neutral style of writing comes to me naturally." (p. 13)
This book, and the companion volume, A Woman's Story, was a best seller in France and has become part of the national culture. What Ernaux has done and does so well is to bring to vivid reality the mundane details of the small town life of twentieth century France. Her style is deliberately "flat" without any striving for effect. There is no satire, and as she intends, no irony, no higher view; indeed the nameless first person narrator, whom the reader must take as Ernaux herself, makes no effort to romanticize any aspect of her story including the part she herself plays. She reveals herself as a creature of her culture and her class just as surely as her father was.
She is a secondary school teacher, apparently in her thirties, something of an incipient intellectual, with a two and a half year old son and a husband who also has nothing in common with her unschooled father. The story begins when her father's death at age sixty-seven goads her into recalling his life and her relationship with him. They are two people joined in blood but apart in both a social and a temporal sense. And this distance is part of what she explores. She speaks of something "indefinable," that had come between them during her adolescence, "something to do with class...Like fractured love." Perhaps we might call it the alienation of generations. He was proud of her because she was accepted by those who would not accept him. She had risen from the working class to the middle class, just as he had risen above his father's station as an illiterate peasant.
There are some intriguing curiosities. For one, the blurb identifies Ernaux as having grown up in the small town of Yvetot, while the narrative uses the quaint transparency "Y-" to identify the town, as though this were a roman a clef. For another, there is a sense of something resembling warmth between her and her father, but no more than that, and this "distance" is never really accounted for except as some inexplicable fact of life. Also, Ernaux's narrator thinks of herself as bourgeois and having risen above the station of her working class parents, yet they are totally bourgeois themselves; indeed more so that she, since they own their simple cafe and store and adjoining property in the small town, while she is the equivalent of a civil servant, her education paid for by the state so that she could be employed by the state. This ingenuous self-revelation persuades us of her honesty and guilelessness and lends a queer sort of very deep veracity to her story.
I will not call this a masterpiece, although I think all writers of fiction ought to read it for the magic of its style. She has quite a nice touch, without artificiality, without contrivance.
Tanya Leslie's translation of the French, often tested because of the large number of idioms used by Ernaux, is natural and very agreeable.
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