Exteriors

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annie ernaux's observations on everyday life are so pertinent and refreshing and hilarious that they make me want to take my headphones off on public transport. Nobody thinks in novel form, so as nice as it is, it’s not a realistic reproduction of the thought process. 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 is the second or third book I've read by Ernaux, who seems to be a favorite of the British publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions, and it's easily the most enjoyable one I've read so far. In some of the books she tries to be almost ruthlessly unemotional, focusing on cold descriptions of events and relationships. I may also be trying to discover something about myself through them, their attitudes or their conversations.It’s a masterclass in understatement, a quality difficult to find nowadays, in literature or life (this sentence being a prime example). Ernaux wanted to capture images with the eye of a photographer, and then translate those captured images into her more familiar medium, the written word. Overall I really like the writing style of Ernaux and the social perspective that is apparent in her writing. Glimpses, scenes, and pieces of overheard dialogues from Ernaux's life as she commutes from her home on the outskirts of Paris to the capital itself, walks the city, and goes to the supermarket(s).

I’ refers to oneself, the reader, and it is inconceivable, or unthinkable, for me to read my own horoscope and behave like some mushy schoolgirl. 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'. Tonight, in the neighbourhood known as Les Linandes, a woman went by on a stretcher held by two firemen. They are the briefest of vignettes, often observations on the train or at one or other of the various supermarkets she visits. As much as I appreciated certain observations and the matter of fact writing, I felt like the book was perhaps too short. This was a shorter and older work, also less personal than the auto fiction she is more known for, but it still is very much an interesting read.

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.

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.

One of the key observations, which Ernaux makes in the introduction, is that for twenty years she has lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometres outside Paris. As a matter of fact, a lot of the entries in Exteriors read like poems, mostly due to their varying lengths and the fact that there’s this subtle, understatedness to them, which can be taken at face-value or reread and mined for universal truths. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place. It’s so understated, in fact, that I’m not sure a publishing house would touch it now were it from an unknown author.It's funny how delving into the lives of others, in only a handful of lines, can often prove to be more captivating to read than even the most labored of novels. 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.