Exteriors

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In doing so, it proposes a new way of thinking about literature and photography, and the ways in which shared themes – such as class, travel, social stereotypes, and individual identity within the modern urban environment – might be explored between these two forms.

I don’t think those years have any especial significance once you know when this was first published.

Ernaux says, “I have sought to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.

It was only after recording all these observations and evesdroppings that she became aware of how much of herself was included in the conversations of others. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux’s books – the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.This may sometimes, though not always be true since I have acquired the mental habit not only of experiencing emotions but of 'getting them into perspective'. In the way the others have constructed “Found” novels from items on the Internet or social media, Ernaux was doing the same decades earlier, from real life. So I think this is the last of the several brief memoirs or autofictions I have read and all in 2022 so far (! But at the same time, the book takes place in France, where in 2004, Institut Montaigne estimated that there were 51 million (85%) white people of European origin. What mesmerizes here, as elsewhere in Ernaux’s oeuvre, is the interplay between the solipsistic intensity of the material and its documentary, disinterested, almost egoless presentation.

As per I find Ernaux sometimes illuminating, but mostly less than impressive and at times, pretentious. Again blurring the line between memoir and fiction, Ernaux continues the story of her family in journal form. In other words, the feelings and thoughts inspired by places and objects are distinct from their cultural content…a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall.

Ernaux's keenest insights are into the uncomfortable relationships between those who live on society's fringes and those more securely in its center. The man who collects the trolleys was resting against the wall of the roofed-in passageway that connects the car park with the square. Committing to paper the movements, postures, and words of the people I meet gives me the illusion that I am close to them. Reminiscent of the poet Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without its Flow, a study of how grief mangles chronology, Simple Passion is a riveting investigation, in a less tragic key, into what happens to one’s experience of time in the throes of romantic obsession.

Nobody thinks in novel form, so as nice as it is, it’s not a realistic reproduction of the thought process. Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person’s lived environment.i'm diving into her more explicitly biographical works here, as she has a lot of works that are assembled entries from her journal which is a format i've always loved. Tonight, in the neighbourhood known as Les Linandes, a woman went by on a stretcher held by two firemen. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive. In fact, I believe that these pitiful character summaries made Exteriors even stronger; they’re honest and quick, and sound like the mind, rather than some beautified version of it.