The 2022 Nobel Laureate is Annie Ernaux

October 6, 2022 4:08 AM

The Swedish Academy has awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature to Annie Ernaux. You can read recent article about her in The New Yorker, London Review of Books and The Guardian.
posted by Kattullus (18 comments total)

Funnily enough, I just recently bought her book The Years, both in English and Finnish translations, so that my wife and I can read it together in our occasional book club.
posted by Kattullus at 4:09 AM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

The Guardian has a liveblog that will update with reactions, and so does The Complete Review's Literary Saloon.
posted by Kattullus at 4:14 AM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hey, Alex Shephard was actually somewhat accurate this year!
posted by Johnny Assay at 4:18 AM on October 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Funnily enough, I just recently bought her book The Years...

I started reading it the day before yesterday, after the Alex Shepard post on Metafilter. Even thought about placing a bet yesterday but thought there was still time to do that today... :)
posted by bigendian at 4:19 AM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting to pick Ernaux over Atwood, this year.
posted by chavenet at 4:22 AM on October 6, 2022

Here's a good essay on Ernaux, from a few days ago, Annie Ernaux’s Total Novel of Life by Jamie Hood. Excerpt:

On May 27 (I verify the date in my diary), H and I meet in the early evening at a theater off the L train to see Happening, Audrey Diwan’s adaptation of Annie Ernaux’s unflinching account of an illegal abortion in 1960s France. We order frozen drinks, get a little buzz on; afterward, we stumble from the darkness into the still, clear, perfectly blue light of early summer, a bit wordless, a bit dazed. Less than a month after this night, the U.S. Supreme Court will reverse almost fifty years of legal precedent by overturning Roe, and Happening’s reemergence in the cultural imaginary will be transformed from historical artifact to signal flare. These events, I know, are not teleologically linked, yet they speak back to one another, are attached in my mind to the same strange membrane. Their temporal proximity collapses the space between disparate eras; the narrative of a young woman’s distant past again made immediate, speaking truth to an entirely contemporary horizon of experience.

To read Ernaux often feels this way: in her exhaustive reckonings with her own life, one finds a search for lost time that exposes the unstable bounds and incoherencies of meaning in our own narratives of its passing. In a moment, as Ernaux has written, when technology and socio-digital media have rendered the “obscurity of previous centuries” obsolete and made it so that those of us still living are beginning to be “resurrected ahead of time,” her meticulous campaign of recording a “total novel” of life imagines narrative beyond the vicissitudes of temporality, deliberately attendant to the unreliable, stuttering nature of remembrance. Ernaux imparts on her reader a sense that memory, like any other knowledge system, is an infinitely changeable field, one given astonishing density by, but not reducible to, the individual experience.

This is the disarming closeness one encounters when brushing up against her work. Though oriented through the needle’s eye of her particular world, her nearly sociological sensibility and investment in generating collective feeling dress her accounts of one woman’s life in uncanny familiarity. The critic Joanna Biggs has professed of this “palimpsestic” affect, “I feel—and I can’t be alone in this—that Ernaux embraces my own story.” Across over twenty books and for the better part of the last five decades, Ernaux has gathered, broken, and reassembled the infinite, singular matter of her history—alongside the history of France in the aftermath of two world wars—in search of (as Madeline Schwartz writes in a review of Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story) “a story that is fully continuous, a story without gaps.” Perhaps no other literary figures, save Proust or Knausgaard, have come as near to achieving so Promethean a project.

posted by Kattullus at 4:30 AM on October 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Also, if you're in New York City, Ernaux is scheduled to give a free lecture this Tuesday at an event with her son, and moderated by Elif Batuman. I imagine that you'll probably need to arrive early to get a seat.
posted by Kattullus at 4:43 AM on October 6, 2022

My library has a bunch of her ebooks available through Hoopla. Interestingly, in English and Spanish, but not as far as I can tell in French. (Not complaining, I think its great there's so many in Spanish; our library system is still primarily English language.) Glad to be able to download something right away. I don't treat the Nobel as a definitive list of the best or most important writers, but it's a fun excuse to read something I might not otherwise. Congrats to Ernaux!
posted by the primroses were over at 4:48 AM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I just realized that Annie Ernaux is the 16th French Nobel laureate in literature, and the 17th woman. Almost as many writers from France have won the Nobel as female writers. The patriarchy is a hell of a thing.
posted by Kattullus at 5:40 AM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting interview with one of Ernaux's English translators Alison L. Strayer
posted by the primroses were over at 5:47 AM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Diary, 1988
posted by chavenet at 7:34 AM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

I was thinking of Katullus's choice of Salman Rushdie for obvious reasons yesterday and mine of Karl Ove Knausgård, then thought of how both Ernaux and Knausgård have both been described as Proustian and then thought Hey, wait a minute -- what about...

Marcel Proust!

Riddle: Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, Ibsen, Strindberg, Zola, Proust, Kafka, Rilke, Brecht, Croce, Hardy, Henry James, Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. J. Lawrence, García Lorca – what do they have in common? Well, yes, but besides that, they were living after the Nobel Prizes got under way, and didn’t win in literature. Sully Prudhomme, José Echegaray, Rudolf Eucken, Paul von Heyse, Verner von Heidenstam, Wladyslaw Reymont, Grazia Deledda, Erik A. Karlfeldt, Frans Sillanpää, and Halldór Laxness did.

Mendeleev of the periodic table and Willard Gibbs of the phase rule didn’t win in chemistry; but Henri Moissan and Fritz Pregl did. Gandhi didn’t win the prize for peace; Bertha von Suttner did. Lister didn’t win in medicine; Johannes Fibiger did. Who was Fibiger? Who indeed?

But that was written fifty odd years ago. Who has missed the cut since?

Indeed, nobelesse oblige aside, hits and misses seem to be the rule rather than the exception and one honored in the breach to boot.

So, has this year's Peace prize been announced? The name Greta Thunberg comes to mind for if not that, then something.

Make it so, Number One. Engage!
posted by y2karl at 7:49 AM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Proust died just nine years after his first book came out, and before the last volume of his one novel had been published. There have probably been at least five hundred authors who could’ve plausibly received the Nobel prize, and the Swedish Academy can only give out one prize per year (though sometimes they’ve split them).

A lot of the authors on the list, good writers all, didn’t really break out internationally in life. García Lorca is a good example. He became much more famous in the years following his murder, and his global fame was cemented by the posthumous Poet in New York.

I do think the Swedish Academy has done a reasonably good job, all things considered. But to have been able to give the prize to, say, Kafka, they’d’ve had to know that some insurance clerk living in Prague dying of tuberculosis had written unpublished novels that will redefine the boundaries of literature. Some others didn’t receive them for other reasons (Tolstoy said he wouldn’t accept it after he didn’t receive the first prize, for example), and others could’ve gotten it, but someone else got the nod.

Also, as an Icelander living in Finland, I have to blow a big raspberry at any disparaging list which includes Laxness and Sillanpää.
posted by Kattullus at 8:43 AM on October 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

Well, your all too well informed opinion aside, I don't know what I am talking about!
So there!
Hinky listicle acknowledged, I slouch corrected.
posted by y2karl at 9:13 AM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

If it was up to me, I would fix this issue mathematically. The Prizes are $1M each. I would split it up and give it to a thousand winners. Each would get $1000.

Ah, wait no, let's make it better. Let's make it 900 winners of $1000 and add to that another hundred thousand winners of $1 each. The $1 winners are those who are outstanding in their own way, but have yet to really put the pedal to the medal. I think this would be a good economic incentive. "You won $1 this year. If you really tried hard you could get $1000 next year. If you don't try, you get nothing, clear?"
posted by storybored at 1:14 PM on October 6, 2022

Also, if one of you folks win the $1 prize, I'll buy if off you for $2.
posted by storybored at 1:15 PM on October 6, 2022

Let's make it 900 winners of $1000 and add to that another hundred thousand winners of $1 each.

This is Amazon's self-publishing model in a nutshell.
posted by chavenet at 2:37 PM on October 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

@Chavnet - Diary, 1988

I have spent the past several months reading through all of my back issues of The Paris Review, and by sheer coincidence, yesterday I read that excerpt in the Spring 2022 issue. I had not read Ernaux before this, and thought her writing was absolutely beautiful.

I believe the Paris Review excerpt is from her new book Getting Lost, which was just published in English (translated by the above-mentioned Alison L. Strayer) last month. Needless to say, I just added it to my TBR pile.
posted by JohnFromGR at 8:06 AM on October 10, 2022 [2 favorites]