The real personal experiences of life can’t be conveyed through language as words get falter when pushed to their very limits, so in a way language was the inadequacy of Ernaux like her father. Maybe I can turn to writing about my own father again because she urges me to, as she urges us all to do. La Place, or The Place, or Positions, is entitled A Man’s Place on the hardcover edition I bought in the mid-eighties that you see above.

A Mans Place HOME | A Mans Place

Even if we assume that is the case then why do people make it public, more importantly, why do they do it when it’s about their private life. And in doing so, taking him part by part, we discover everything that made him be, parent’s parts we may even recognize, in ours. In the above paragraph, I sense her emotions of separation, the feeling of her father as unknowable, the sense of a lack of connection between them.There is a translucent quality to the way that she colours her mother’s life in the book that is dedicated to her, but her father’s life here is depicted as a packed up, boxed entity.

Annie Ernaux and the brutal art of memoir - New Statesman

As she progressed through school, attended university and entered the world of the highly educated, he, hardened by a life of physical labour, looked on her achievements with suspicion, if a quiet admiration too. When she received the Nobel Prize in Literature this year, she must have felt a great sense of pride on behalf of her parents, and how especially proud her father, who came from a "working class" background, would have been to see his daughter achieve world renown.Não encaminha o leitor para o prazer de uma cumplicidade, que recusa em todas as suas formas: nostalgia, patético ou desdém.