The French author’s first novel was 1974’s Les armoires vides; His most ambitious project, Les Ennis (The Years), has been called “the first collective autobiography”.
The French writer’s first novel was les armoires videos of 1974; his most ambitious project les anises (Theyears, Has been called “the first collective autobiography”.
The story so far: Eighty-year-old French writer Anne Arnoux from France, often referred to as France’s “truth-teller”, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature Announcing the award on Thursday, 6 October, the Swedish Academy said that Arnoux was awarded “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, systems and collective restrictions of individual memory”.
Annie Arnox: The Early Years
This file photo taken in Paris on November 12, 1984, shows French author Anne Arnoux. , photo credit: AFP
Born in September 1940, Arnoux grew up in Yvettet, a small town in Normandy, France. Much of her work is rooted in this childhood setting where her parents used to run a combined grocery store and cafe.
“Their setting was poor but ambitious, with parents who had drawn themselves from proletarian existence to bourgeois life, where memories of beaten earth floors never disappeared, but where politics were rarely carved. ”, the Swedish Academy noted on his biography. Ernox.
In his first novel, les armoires videos (1974), translated and published in English cleaned out In 1990, she began investigating her general background, the Academy notes. However, Arnoux’s breakthrough work was his fourth novel. la place (1983), published in English as instead of a man in 1992. The Academy describes the 100-page novel as “an unbiased portrait of her father and the entire social milieu that originally created her”, where she uses her signature restrained and morally inspired aesthetic. Arnoux was nominated for the International Booker Prize in 2019 for his most ambitious project year (2017, les aniso2008).
The author, who left university at the age of 18, calls herself a “class protector”, describing writing as a political act and the best thing she could do as said defector. According to Agency France Presse, The author often speaks openly about the guilt and shame of climbing the social ladder, which she felt was a betrayal against her parents and her way of life.
She married in her twenties and has two sons from the marriage, which ended in divorce in 1984, after which she raised her children alone. For years she taught writing in Paris, where she still lives.
Works of Nobel Prize Winners
Books by French author Anne Arnoux are on display at the Swedish Academy following the announcement that Arnoux is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature this year. , photo credit: AFP
In her writings, Arnox, almost as a pattern, examines a life marked by strong inequalities about gender, language and class, using tools such as history and her own memory, which she regularly questions and is incomplete. as described.
Madeleine Schwartz Inn the new Yorker Arnox as an “abnormal memoirist” who “distrusts her memory”, and does not hesitate to tell the reader where her memory is empty, with her past as an authoritative entity. Doesn’t reveal, but “unpacking” it.
His portrait of his father: instead of a manand of his mother: story of a woman, are considered contemporary classics in France. She scrutinizes her father, a practical man who did not allow much affection for his family, almost coldly, through his precise memory, revealing his unnatural adherence to social standards and a lifetime of embarrassment. . The Academy notes that, in contrast, in the portrait of his mother, Arnoux pays a wonderful tribute, with equal brevity, to a strong woman “who was able to maintain her dignity higher than that of the father, often in appalling circumstances”. .
In Simple Obsession (1991), translated by Tanya Leslie, Arnoux writes: “Since September last year, I have done nothing but wait for a man.” She blurs the line between fact and fiction to write about a two-year relationship with a foreigner who was married. During this period, he is indifferent to everything in the novel except the works related to this person named A. She read newspaper articles about her country, wrote letters to it, selected clothes and makeup, changed sheets, arranged flowers, wrote down things that might interest her, bought whiskey , envisioning their time together, and thus filling “in time”. Between two encounters.” She writes that the contact made her experience pain, empathy, and compassion for other people.
Ernox pursues her passion as if she were searching for the meaning of existence and life. Describing her relationship with another person, she also explores the power of imagination and memory; And also arrives at the final truth – “From the beginning and throughout our affair, I have had the privilege of knowing what we find in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.” When the affair ends, and she bursts with sadness, Ernox has an overarching urge to one day visit a building where she had an abortion two decades ago, “as if hopefully this will last.” The trauma will cancel my current grief.” With the Nobel Prize, France and the world outside Europe will discover the “truth-teller” of France, who has described life without borders in all his works. The Outer, for example, is a magazine on contemporary life on the outskirts of Paris, filled with joy, loss, triumph, tragedy and chaos.
In year (2017), which won her “international recognition, a mass of followers and literary disciples”, French memoirists write of her life from 1941 to 2006, as “all images will disappear”—images, “real or imaginary, who follow us to sleep.”
In yearThe Booker Prize Foundation notes, “through the lens of memory, past and present impressions, photographs, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines” spanning more than 6 decades. “The local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names of ever-expanding objects are given voice.” The use of these historical points of reference, and the repeated use of the collective statement through “we”, creates year A “collective autobiography” of its kind. Arnox also views her life as an outsider, often describing her past in the third person. It has been lauded by the German poet Ders Grünbein as a pioneering “sociological epic” of the contemporary Western world.
A masterpiece of his creation is a 23-year-old narrator’s medically banned narrative about an illegal abortion, l’venement (2000; Is happening2001), mentions the Academy.
Ernox’s thoughts on writing
Arnox has said that writing is a political act, which opens our eyes to social inequality. For this purpose she uses language as a “knife”, as she says, to tear down the veil of imagination.
She has called herself an “archivist” and “her own ethnographer” rather than a writer of fiction, as she examines her own memory and documents how she feels about the events of her life as they happen in the past. This is the gift of foresight, adding that it was happening.
As the “truth-teller,” suffering accompanies Arnoux in his reconstruction of her past as she tries to “cross the limits of the tolerable,” notes the Academy. in his book la honte (1996; Shame1998), she wrote: “I’ve always wanted to write a book that I find impossible to talk about later, the kind of book that makes it impossible for me to stand the eyes of others.”
the memoir told new York Times About her sweetest asset two years ago. “Frankly, I would rather die now than lose all I have seen and heard. The memory, to me, is inexhaustible. ”