Annie Ernaux Critical Essay | Critical Review by Dominic Di Bernardi

SOURCE: A review of La Place and Une Femme, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 8, No. 3, Fall, 1988, pp. 163-64.

In the review below, Di Bernardi offers a laudatory assessment of A Woman's Story and A Man's Place, praising Ernaux's focus on class, guilt, identity, and personal history in these works.

Annie Ernaux, a novelist concentrating on autobiographical themes, offers in La Place and Une Femme an account of the lives of her father and mother, respectively. The story of her father centers on his social ambition—"the place" he wished to make for himself and that he was fiercely conscious of keeping when faced with his social superiors, among whom is his university-educated daughter. On the other hand, her mother is examined as the affective link with the world the writer left, whose very physical presence, "words, hands, gestures, her way of walking and laughing are what...
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