Cahier Annie Ernaux

 If you want a good book for a best understanding of author Annie Ernaux

, Nobel Prize 2022, Cahier de l'Herne will represent the best answer to you. Ernaux, born poor, studied, becoming someone different from her parents. This differentiation meant to her and her family a contrast and an advancement. Her father was surprised by this daughter who, thanks her intellectual skills was in grade to change tongue for speaking with strangers. The differentiation of status along her way meant to Ernaux a lucid analysis of her own existence. When she studied at the high school, she understood the superiority of her classmates, from wealthy families and living in beautiful part of the city. 

Reading and writing have been strong passions discovered soon by the author. Although she doesn't like to be represented in a defined style or genre, Ernaux focuses on auto-biographical thematics: her past, her strongest experiences. The departure of the mother, a clandestine love-story, a book on that sister never seen... Her writing are a continuous research of truth thanks to the restitution of sensations. Ernaux thinks that words creates in their complexity, truth. 

Ernaux confesses that more than writing for the expectation of readers, she writes for herself. Readers are important but what she proposes to them is a process that starts from her intimacy for later irradiate them with her words. I found interesting the piece by Danielle Arbid, director who decided to put on the big screen the book by Annie on her clandestine relationship with a Russian man. In the several sections where portions of her journals are relased the serious health issue, a breast cancer, experienced by Ernaux. Her lovers had said her that she wouldn't never become old. Upset because of the hormonal cures she was doing, she confessed that she decided to throw away that pills, maybe cause of the appearance of cancer.

A brief writing of Annie Ernaux at the beginning of the chapter on Les Années focuses on the society of the third millennium and what it means for women and men, in comparison to the society found and left by her mother, where plastic surgery, contraceptive pill were unknown like a lot of other freedoms experienced later by her: the paradoxality of a society where just a little portion of world is rich and the rest is starved.

The painting by Dorothea Tanning of a woman in her 30s, 40s, attracts Ernaux so much for the powerful messages that give to women: open doors, future, expectations.

In the painting this beauty woman touches a handle, her eyes are still uncertain, she doesn't know what the future will deserve for her and, close a monstrous bird, with eyes plenty of curiousity on this world. It is in fact a stranger creature.The face like the one of a bat, but the body completely different, there is a tail as well. Maybe it is a deformed cat, with wings.

This painting intrigues Ernaux so badly: she confesses  she could spend hours looking at this.

Rome and Venice remains the cities of love for Ernaux, while in England, young and an au pair, starts to write.  

In an interview Ernaux reveals that her passion for writing is endless and that once she ends a book, she is ready for another literature adventure, and she must report everything. A strong and sometimes conflictual relationship the one with pictures, seen as presence and absence at the same time, they represent the fluidity of time and time passing by: a picture is individuality but also collectivity and it's maybe the strongest witness of our passage in this world. 

A teacher as well, this work permitted her to remain connected with the reality: transmitting and educating is what a teacher does in a daily base and it is the most important action that exist in the world. That world helped, stimulated a lot her writings. 

Annie Ernaux says that living to her means to be "dans or sur l'ecriture."

A cahier that you will simply adore. Perfect gift for Christmas!

Anna Maria Polidori