I had a bit of an unusual experience with A Man’s Place, Nobel Prize–winner Annie Ernaux’s 1983 book inspired by her father’s death. I started out reading La place in the original French, in one of those handsome Gallimard editions that are the exact kind of anonymous that I’ve come to associate with luxury goods. I made it about 20 or so pages over the course of a week before deciding I was over it. The writing felt somehow too mannered, too self-possessed, like I was watching a pretentious art film.
I had a copy of the English translation, A Man’s Place, and decided to give that a quick look before ditching the book entirely. I started from the beginning, and a strange thing happened: I was so absorbed by what I was reading that I kept reading, clearing 20 or 30 pages of book while standing at the dining room table. What had initially seemed overly mannered and affectedly brusque in the French suddenly felt like an author maintaining the necessary distance to keep herself together.
I still can’t account for it. The French is not particularly difficult, and the English translation is nearly word-for-word how I myself would translate it were I given the task. Why, then, was this the case? More confounding, when I mentioned the issue to my friend Sara, she told me that over the years she had had multiple friends tell her that Ernaux is best read in translation. These were all French speakers, with a variety of native languages. If anyone has any theories, I’m all ears.
A Man’s Place is about Ernaux’s father. In the process of depicting his life, it cannot help but be about class and family relationships, and how those intersect. The first passage I underlined came some 30 pages into this 90-page book, when Ernaux imagines the moment her parents met. “My mother must have been impressed…when she met him at the rope factory. Before then she had worked in a margarine plant. A tall, dark man with grey eyes, he held himself upright and was a trifle conceited. ‘My husband never looked working-class.’”
Something about Ernaux’s mother using “my husband” while talking to Ernaux about her father struck me as remarkably intimate. It feels proud, warmly possessive, and immensely personal. It’s almost uncomfortable to read. I’m realizing now as I write this that Ernaux never tells us her parents’ names, and somehow that serves to make that passage all the more moving. All we are, all we have, is our relationships with those who love us, and so the people here are defined in those terms.
While Ernaux’s parents began life as working class, they managed to work their way up. They opened a grocery store and café, becoming fixtures of the local community in the process. A lot of the most interesting material here relates to the difficulties that result from successfully achieving what I guess we can’t quite call the American Dream, from managing to make more of your financial situation. Relatives appear from time to time, expecting groceries for free while referring to the pair as superior.
Most touching is the impact their transition has on their relationship with their own daughter. When her father visits her as an adult, “I described the flat, the Louis-Philippe writing desk, the hi-fi system and the red velvet armchairs. He soon lost interest. He had brought me up to enjoy the luxuries he himself had been denied, therefore he was happy, but the antique dresser and the Dunlopillo mattress meant nothing more to him than the signs of social success. He often cut me short by saying, ‘You’re quite right to make the most of it.’” He has spent his life working so she can became a part of a world that holds little for him outside of the aspirational possibility of getting there. “Every time I did well in [school], he saw it as an achievement and the hope that one day I might be better than him.” [Italics hers.]
That theme is even reflected in his language, with frequent references to the ways he would oscillate back and forth between textbook French and his native Brittany dialect. It reminded me of Elena Ferrante’s protagonists in the Neapolitan Novels, individuals who manage a similar upward climb over the course of their lives, who would resort to dialect when angry. We are who we are. We can change the surrounding circumstances, but that doesn’t mean we can change ourselves.