Exteriors

by Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

Overview

In Exteriors, Annie Ernaux concentrates not on the essential details of a relationship with a family member or lover as before but on ephemeral encounters within the larger circle of one's environment and the hundreds of strangers who inhabit it. Here, she captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of a great city: tortured, chaotic, lyrical, and powerfully alive. 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, the first in which she is able to leave her past behind.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Ernaux's best subject is Ernaux. Her autobiographical novels like Cleaned Out, A Woman's Story, A Man's Place and Simple Passion succeeded brilliantly because Ernaux is mordantly critical of every characterespecially her own. As the title suggests, this isn't a meditation on Ernaux's inner workings but rather a writer's notebook of observations from which Ernaux herself is largely absent. Most of the pieces arise from rail trips between Paris and her home in Cergy-Pontoise, "a new town 40 kilometers outside of Paris." Ernaux's keenest insights are into the uncomfortable relationships between those who live on society's fringes and those more securely in its center. She describes a man leaning against a wall in a subway corridor: "He was not asking for money. Drawing level with him, one noticed that his fly was open, revealing his balls. An unbearable sighta shattering form of dignity." She recalls pedestrians who carefully avoid a section of pavement inscribed by an absent petitioner: "To buy food. I have no family.'' Contrasted with this is the tortured relationship between people and materialism. "I realize," she says, "that I am forever combing reality for signs of literature." But these are just signs. Assembled in this loose and largely unremarkable series of vignettes, they are not yet literature. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

Exteriors is honest, genuine and skillfully executed.” —Columbus Dispatch

“Ernaux's writings walk a tightrope between art and confession, immersing us in a territory bounded on one side by commitment and on the other by desire.” —Newsday

“Journal du dehors (Exteriors) is the opposite of an intimate diary. It shows a woman observing, without scorn or pity, the world out of which she came . . . . It is the text of a writer for whom the text is, simultaneously, interiority and provocation.” —Telerama

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173632524
Publisher:	Dreamscape Media
Publication date:	12/10/2019
Edition description:	Unabridged

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