1 Le jeune homme [The Young Man], Annie Ernaux 4/5
This is Ernaux’s most recently published book (though it was apparently drafted from 1998-2000) and it’s novella-sized: only about 30 pages long. It’s about the relationship she had with Philippe Vilain (referred to in this text as ‘A’), when she was a famous writer in her 50s and he was a university student in his 20s. Like the narrator, ‘A’ comes from an economically deprived milieu in northern France, and she describes vividly how her relationship with him enables her to re-experience aspects of her own earlier life, with past and present overlapping in a palimpsest. Notably, his student flat turns out to be opposite the Rouen hospital where she nearly died in her 20s after undergoing an illegal abortion. The book also reflects on how their relationship transgresses conventional norms (due to the age gap between the two of them, with the woman being so much older). Short but powerful.
2 Mauvais élève [Bad Pupil – not translated into English yet], Philippe Vilain 4/5
After learning that the academic and novelist Philippe Vilain wrote his own memoir last year, and that it included an account of his relationship with Annie Ernaux, I couldn’t resist the temptation to seek out this book. It was moving and well-written (though his luxuriously long sentences, punctuated by commas, are very different from Ernaux’s succinct style). His mother is a typist, his father an alcoholic, and his mother eventually leaves both father and son in order to start a new life for herself in a suburb of Paris. Like Ernaux, Vilain is a ‘transfuge de classe’ (class defector), who moves from a working-class world to a bourgeois intellectual one, and doesn’t feel entirely at home in either. His portrait of Ernaux is largely positive (she was his mentor after all), but he notes that her background is in fact more privileged than his (her parents were shopkeepers, and paid to have her educated at a good school). As engrossed as I am by what Ernaux herself as referred to as ‘auto-socio-biography’ (literary autobiography that incorporates sociological reflection), the implied competition between writers is a little unsettling (whose childhood was the most deprived? Which writer has been most successful in retaining ties to ‘the people’ despite their hard-won middle-class identity? These aren’t things that can be measured, after all). Still, this is a memoir very much worth reading in its own right, beyond the Ernaux connection that initially drew me in.
3 Immaculate Conception, Ling Ling Huang 4/5
A startlingly original novel that has a thrilling plot (with sci-fi elements) AND reflects on deep philosophical questions. Thanks @EineReiseDurchDieZeit for recommending this! The young, insecure artist Enka develops an intense, complicated friendship with a fellow artist, the genius Mathilde. With new technology that enables a person to occupy another person’s mind, the novel quickly descends into some very dark places. At times the sheer number of themes covered is a little dizzying (friendship, jealousy, artistic originality, AI, maternity, social inequality, what constitutes a self), but this is definitely a read that will stay with me.