More Annie Ernaux

There is something that always happens when I discover an author I largely resonate with: I plan to read all his/her books. Although after a while, especially if the writer was prolific, there are many common topics that one will reckon with, creating a kind of familiar/predictable space, you still feel at home, in the home of the mind of that writer.

My latest literary pleasure was reading Annie Ernaux. Is started with The Years, followed by other short books: L´occupation and L´événement. All in the beautiful original French language.

L´occupation - I dare to translate it by Habit - is a short-time obsession about an ex life. It happens more than once: you part ways with someone, he has his life, separate of yours, but the emotional attachment cannot be cut overnight. One may be still longing for the other, some longer than the others. We may want to see what happened to them - subconsciously to compare, to wonder how can someone can survive without us, how does she look like, what is she doing...search online, trace; all those may happen of boredom, but also because a broken heart has its own grammar of suffering. There is different way in which one may react, but this story has so much suffering in its shortness and brevity. Things happen, this is how they happen, read the story...

L´événement - The event/occurrence, in my free translation - is about a topic I haven´t read about before: an abortion. An abortion in France, in the 1960s, at a time when abortion was illegal. One may wonder how a country so reluctant to mix state and religion allowed it, but politics do have their own subrepticious ways - and a mostly Catholic elite de souche to nurture. What is unique in this book is not only the focus on the desperate search against the clock for a doctor to perform the abortion, but what really happens with the woman body during an abortion, her suffering, the sensations, the loss. The trauma a body will care, even will further receive pleasure. The loneliness of the woman who is doing it alone, on her own, unable for social reasons to share her suffering with her parents. The trauma, the suffering, not the shame. Shameful is to bring to life a human being you never wanted.