Exteriors

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It is a collection of journal entries written over the course of seven years (1985-1992), when she lived in Cergy-Pontoise, a new town forty kilometers outside of Paris. I felt I was riding towards the sun; it was setting beyond the criss-cross lines of pylons hurtling towards the centre of the New Town. describing various people the French author Annie Ernaux witnessed (usually on the metro) from 1985 to 1992.

Ernaux says, “I have sought to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to preserve the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered. She talks about how, in New York, she saw Paul Strand’s photographs and was blown away by the fact that the subjects were “simply there,” and considered that to be “the ideal vision of writing; inaccessible. It was only after recording all these observations and evesdroppings that she became aware of how much of herself was included in the conversations of others. At one point in her life, Ernaux moved to a “new town” on the outskirts of Paris, and since it was a place with no history so far, she began keeping a journal to record history in the making. Strangely enough, there exists another truth, the exact opposite: when we go back to a town we left a long time ago, we imagine that the people there will still be the same, unchanged.One of Ernaux’s most idiosyncratic qualities is how she never lets us forget her role as author (a sort of postmodern Tristram Shandy). As much as I appreciated certain observations and the matter of fact writing, I felt like the book was perhaps too short. So I think this is the last of the several brief memoirs or autofictions I have read and all in 2022 so far (! In the way the others have constructed “Found” novels from items on the Internet or social media, Ernaux was doing the same decades earlier, from real life. By upsetting our complacency, she encourages readers to continually question her writing, and thus art generally.

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. 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. Ernaux does a marvelous job balancing the two and showing that blemishes are a part of life, and should be appreciated as such: “On the walls of the railroad station in Cergy, after the October riots, one could read: ALGERIA I LOVE YOU, with blood-red flowers between ‘Algeria’ and ‘I.az állampolgárok egy részét lekisemberező köztársasági elnök, az anyagi jólétét spektákulummá fejlesztő szűzérmevásárló házaspár a hentesnél (a szegényebb réteg szupermarketbe jár), a hajléktalanok, a koldusok, a Saint-Lazare pályaudvar, felfüggesztve az időben, mind-mind irodalommá lényegül át.

The man who collects the trolleys was resting against the wall of the roofed-in passageway that connects the car park with the square. Ernaux's keenest insights are into the uncomfortable relationships between those who live on society's fringes and those more securely in its center. Reading Ernaux, I was reminded of how the pathway to owning the surrounding around us by putting the observations in a tabloid is a very indirect way of knowing ourselves. In other words, the feelings and thoughts inspired by places and objects are distinct from their cultural content…a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall.i also love how ernaux admits that she has put much more of herself into this book than planned, since "memories and obsessions subconsciously dictating my choice of words and the scenes i wished to freeze". Ez az első - és egyetlen, azt hiszem -, ami nem Ernaux életét tárgyalja, noha tulajdonképpen ezek a benyomások is személyesek. 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. 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. 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.