The Young Man
3.190 kr.In her latest work, Annie Ernaux recounts a relationship with a student thirty years her junior – an experience that transforms her, briefly, back into the ‘scandalous girl’ of her youth. When she is with him, she replays scenes she has already lived through, feeling both ageless and closer to death. Laid like a palimpsest on the present, the past’s immediacy pushes her to take a decisive step in her writing – producing, in turn, the need to expunge her lover. At once stark and tender, The Young Man is a taut encapsulation of Ernaux’s relationship to time, memory and writing.
Happening
3.190 kr.In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep that child. This is the story, written forty years later, of a trauma Ernaux never overcame. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist, and ends up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly dies. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days. Clearly, cleanly, she gleans the meanings of her experience.
The Other Girl
3.190 kr.One Sunday in Yvetot, August 1950. Annie is playing outside in the sun. Her mother steps out of the grocery to chat with a customer, a few metres from her. The two women’s conversation is perfectly audible; its scraps become etched forever in Annie’s memory. Before she was born, her parents had another daughter. She died at the age of six from diphtheria. Annie will never hear another word from her parents about this unknown sister, nor will she ask them a single question about her: their family unit has formed in the image of its vanished predecessor. In The Other Girl, brilliantly translated for the first time into English by Alison L. Strayer, Annie Ernaux explores the meaning of this family secret, and the insurmountable distance that separates the two sisters.
Exteriors
3.490 kr.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. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive. 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.
The Possession
3.190 kr.‘The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city – the whole world – with a person you may never have met.’ These words set the framework for The Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman’s need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved’s life. Ernaux’s writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection.
Atburðurinn
4.390 kr.„Árum saman hefur þessi atburður fylgt mér eins og skugginn. Þegar ég les um fóstureyðingu í skáldsögu fyllist ég ósjálfrátt geðshræringu, rétt eins og orðin umhverfist á samri stund í ofsafengna tilfinningu. Á sama hátt kemst ég í uppnám þegar ég heyri af tilviljun „La javanaise“, „J’ai la mémoire qui flanche“ eða önnur dægurlög sem voru mér hugstæð á þessum tíma.“ – Annie Ernaux
Nóbelsverðlaunaskáldið Annie Ernaux er ein mikilvægasta rödd samtímabókmennta í Frakklandi.
Atburðurinn er fjórða bókin sem kemur út eftir hana á íslensku en áður hefur Ugla gefið út Staðinn, Unga manninn og Konu.
Þórhildur Ólafsdóttir íslenskaði.
Kona
4.390 kr.Við andlát móður sinnar úr alzheimer-sjúkdómnum heldur Annie Ernaux í ferðalag aftur í tímann til að reyna að bregða upp sannferðugri mynd af konunni sem mótaði líf hennar.
Hún veltir fyrir sér tengslum móður og dóttur, viðkvæmum og óhagganlegum í senn, ólíkum heimum sem aðskilja þær og hinum óumflýjanlega sannleika að öll sjáum við á bak þeim sem við unnum.
Látlaus en áhrifaríku lofgjörð dóttur til móður þar sem jafnframt er brugðið upp eftirminnilegri mynd af dótturinni.
Þórhildur Ólafsdóttir íslenskaði.
Nóbelsverðlaunaskáldið Annie Ernaux er ein mikilvægasta rödd samtímabókmennta í Frakklandi. Tvær bækur hafa komið út eftir hana á íslensku, Staðurinn og Ungi maðurinn.
Staðurinn
4.390 kr.Hann fór aldrei inn á safn, las eingöngu héraðsblaðið og notaði alltaf Opinel-hnífinn þegar hann tók til matar síns. Verkamaðurinn sem varð smákaupmaður. Hann flíkaði ekki tilfinningum sínum en bar þá einlægu von í brjósti að dóttir hans gengi menntaveginn og yrði föðurbetrungur.
Dóttirin er Annie Ernaux, einn kunnasti rithöfundur Frakklands.
Í þesssar vönduðu bók fjallar hún á nærfarin hátt um samband sitt við föður sinn sem hún unni. Hún afhjúpar sársaukafulla fjarlægð sem myndaðist milli hennar og föður hennar sem sagði eitt sinn við hana: „Bækur og tónlist, það er gott fyrir þig. Ég þarfnast þess ekki til að lifa.“
