Shame – WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE: Annie Ernaux Paperback – 20 Sept. 2023

A book that needed to be written. And one that should be reread again and again.

Beautifully atmospheric interlaced with the author reviewing her shame and how events memories. Societal norms and prejudices compound shame.Another unforgettable book by Annie Ernaux.

Ernaux as always is excellent here.

The more I read of Ernaux, the clearer it becomes that each piece of writing is a fragment of a greater oeuvre that contemplates a historicised sense of European and female self in the latter half of the twentieth century forwards. Different aspects of 'Annie Ernaux' are foregrounded in each book, expressing a sense of the mutability and lack of easy coherence, that inability to say definitively and once and for all 'this is I'.In this book, Ernaux returns to her parents and her adolescence, tracing the forces that press on her identity: class and socio-economic grouping, post-war generation, suburban France, education, religion, gender politics. The 'shame' of the title is generated in multiple ways and serves as a version of Proust's madeleine in the way it holds and releases memories that continue to shape her psyche.As always, Ernaux's writing has a clean, clinical precision as she takes a scalpel to her memories of her earlier self. I think it is recognised that the two over-riding passions which propel Ernaux's writing are shame and desire: this book, originally published in the 1990s, is thus a critical component in understanding Ernaux's overarching project.