SOURCE: Osborne, Linda Barrett. “Snapshots from the Edge.” Washington Post Book World 26, no. 45 (10 November 1996): 6.

In the following positive review of A Frozen Woman and Exteriors, Osborne lauds Ernaux's “ability to refine ordinary experience, stripping it of irrelevancy and digression and reducing it to a kind of iconography of the late-20th-century soul.”

Annie Ernaux's work can evoke the same response that some modern art does in viewers: a tendency to think that, because it appears simple or direct in composition, it was simple to conceive, that anyone could create the same forms and impressions. Instead, at her best, Ernaux has the ability to refine ordinary experience, stripping it of irrelevancy and digression and reducing it to a kind of iconography of the late-20th-century soul.

A Frozen Woman, first published in France in 1981, is a young wife and mother's fictional lament on the inequality of the sexes and...