NEW YORK, Oct 11 (US): Since Annie Ernault won the Nobel Prize for Literature last week, the French author’s books have gained enough new fans that many are out of stock on Amazon.com and in physical bookstores, and some aren’t available a month or more.
But in Albertine’s books on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, her Monday night appearance seemed like no introduction from a group of old friends, French and Americans alike, the Associated Press reports.
The event, which can be accessed on the second floor via a winding staircase inside the French Embassy’s cultural services, was sold out before the Nobel Prize was announced.
On Monday, an early row of attendees stretched around the corner, as hundreds finally crowded inside, including a surplus crowd who watched by video broadcasting from the floor below.
The 82-year-old Erno was acclaimed by a standing audience that included fellow authors Garth Greenwell and Rachel Kushner, speaking at length and at an energetic pace, through her translator, about her career and writing process.
Her extended answers contrast with the economic style of her famous short autobiographical books, among them the 64-page “Simple Passion” and 96-page “Happening”, her frank recollection of an illegal abortion in 1963 that was adapted last year into a French-language film. bears the same name.
The night has been described as “the art of depicting life in writing”. Erno, in an interview with author Kate Zamperino, likened her work to a long-term exploration of her mind, echoing a sentiment shared by authors: they write to discover what they’re thinking.
“Literature seemed to me the only means of arriving at what I would call either truth or reality,” she said. “It is a way of making things clear, not in a simple way—on the contrary, writing things makes them more complicated. It is also a way, as long as something is not written, it doesn’t really exist.”
Raised in the Normandy countryside, Erno has been praised by Nobel rulers for showing “great courage and clinical intelligence” in revealing “the suffering of the experience of class, and describing shame, humiliation, jealousy, or the inability to see who you are”. Erno said Monday night that her goal was never to write a “beautiful book” or to be part of the literary world that celebrates her now, but rather to express and make her ideas and experiences accessible to others.
Zamperino recalled a moment in “An Happening” when Erno went to the library to look for an abortion and yet she couldn’t find any books mentioning it. Erno explained that the books had “nourished and fed her” since childhood, and that she was sensitive to what they didn’t include as much as they did.
An “event” in itself was a bit of a correction, and she was confident it would resonate, especially since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last summer. Ernault remembered her advocacy for the right to abortion, which France legalized in 1975, and her gratitude to a “sorority” of her peers with whom she could share her story.
But even the most intimate discussions did not have the permanent ability to put words into a linked text.
She said, “Years later, after I had an abortion, in the 2000s when I chose to write about what I called an ‘event’ or an ‘event,’ people would ask me ‘Why are you coming back to this? “And that was because I felt there was something to undo, to look at, to explore. It is only through the narration that ‘what happens’ can be viewed in this way.