Annie Ernaux / Quotes

Annie Ernaux

QUOTES

Annie Ernaux

"Annie Ernaux is the sort of writer who practices vivisection. With words, she lays open a life -- not only her own but others' as well: mother, father, lover, friend. Keen language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse." 

- Kathryn Harrison, The New York Times Book Review (28/11/1999)

"Ms. Ernaux (...) has created something of a genre: the emotionally minimalist, stylistically uninflected chronicles of a hypersensitive middle-aged woman examining her own life and those of her parents. Her work represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory." 

- Richard Bernstein, The New York Times (22/11/1999)

"Annie Ernaux's work is remarkably of a piece, each book circling back to paraphrase, correct, emendate, and reinvest earlier ones. (...) Her work, with its blurring of fictional, autobiographical, and confessional elements, of the discursive and the representational, leads us virtually with each sentence to question supposed borders between finding and making, re-creation and reinvention; to question the notion of literature itself." 

- James Sallis, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring/2000)

"Annie Ernaux is not afraid of feelings. She writes like a general in command of a vast army of feelings." 

- Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times (30/9/2001)

"Annie Ernaux writes short, spare autobiographical books that are quickly dispensed with and difficult to forget. With the dispassion and efficiency of a military strategist, she ambushes her past, prying it from its refuge in nostalgia and oblivion and holding it up naked for all to see." 

- Emily Eakins, The New York Times Book Review (28/10/2001)

"Ernaux's talent lies in her distinctive style, characterized by its simplicity, truthful nature, and occasional brutal violence. In the space of a few pages, she captures the reader, who is seduced by the economy of her prose." 

- E.Nicole Meyer, World Literature Today (Winter/2002)

"Annie Ernaux is long overdue to be recognised in Britain as one of the most important writers in contemporary France, and this edition of The Years ought to do the trick." 

- Lauren Elkin, The Guardian (22/6/2018)

"In this attempt at unearthing, her prose combines the spare and the unsparing. She seems desperate to put it all on the page: period blood, abortions, contraceptive pills, dirty underwear, erections, and semen. But Ernaux's writing is rubbed down, simple, almost clinical in its exactness. From the vantage of adulthood, she Googles and questions, she revisits old haunts and reads old letters, as if she were a detective cracking an unsolvable case: the mystery of her own past. (...) Central to her work is an awareness that the most intimate moments of life are always governed by the circumstances in which they occur -- that probing the personal will also involve investigating the historical." 

- Madeleine Schwartz, The New Yorker (20/4/2020)