Look at the Lights, My Love

by Annie Ernaux Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

Overview

A revelatory meditation on class and consumer culture, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux

 

“A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler.”-Kirkus Reviews

For half a century, the French writer Annie Ernaux has transgressed the boundaries of what stories are considered worth telling, what subjects worth exploring. In this probing meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature.

Recording her visits to a store near Paris for over a year, she captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Through Ernaux's eyes, the superstore emerges as “a great human meeting place, a spectacle”-a flashy, technologically advanced incarnation of the ancient marketplace where capitalism, cultural production, and class converge, dictating our rhythms of desire. With her relentless powers of observation, Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Translated from the French with great intelligence and sensitivity by Alison Strayer. . . . Ernaux’s diary is a provocation: to accept these life scenes as worthy of our time and attention.”—Kate Briggs, Washington Post

A New Yorker Best of the Week Pick

“[Ernaux’s] chief mode is curiosity, translated with perfect, inquisitive casualness by Alison L. Strayer. She peeks into shopping carts, eavesdrops on conversations, notices the gender dynamics of salesmanship.”—Laura Marris, Times Literary Supplement

“[Ernaux] studies the ‘great human meeting place’ of the big-box superstore, keeping a diary of her visits to a mall near Paris and analyzing what it means to confront our desires and those of others in the marketplace.”—New Yorker

“A fascinating read. . . . Ernaux provides an ensemble of potent subtexts dealing with practices and people linked through commerce and commodities.” —Sharmila Purkayastha, The Telegraph (India)

“The subject at the heart of Look at the Lights, My Love is what we reveal of ourselves in the strange sterility of the store. . . . Ernaux’s singular style conveys both the soullessness and the dreamlike charm of the place.”—Tess Little, Literary Review

“What makes Look at the Lights a work of art, rather than a manifesto, is the sheer sensuousness of Ernaux’s language . . . the subtle visual, auditory, and tactile details that fill the pages and lend firsthand credibility to the argument. . . . [Ernaux] reanimates a shared humanity that consumerism has flattened out.”—J. Howard Rosier, The Atlantic

“Look at the Lights, My Love plays a formal sleight-of-hand in the best way, with the feel of a dashed-off journal but the felt experience of a deeply philosophical meditation on the nature of shopping, voyeurism, late-stage capitalism, class, race, and desire.”—Adrienne Raphel, Paris Review Daily

A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2023

“A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Ernaux, as always, is endlessly brilliant and incisive as she thinks through ideas of class, consumer culture, working women, and more.”—Pierce Alquist, Book Riot

“This slim book enlarges our sense of ourselves, insisting as it does on how alike we are.”—Michael Autrey, Booklist

“This French writer’s ability to mine her everyday experiences for broader sociological, cultural, and in this case economic significance comes through in nearly every page of this slim volume. . . . I for one will never go through another checkout line—automated or not—without thinking about Annie Ernaux.”—Pat Reber, Arts Fuse

“At once a consideration of class, feminism, and food deserts, Look at the Lights, My Love captures the hyper-acceleration of capital. . . . Every store shelf elicits revelation.”—Grace Byron, Cleveland Review of Books

“[A] tribute to the modern superstore, a site that matches [Ernaux’s] fascination with individual and collective desire . . . inviting us to look through a different window at what we’ve seen before. . . . The fascination of Ernaux’s little book for readers is the inner debate it exposes about what art is, where it belongs, whom it is for, and what a worthy subject it is.”—Catherine Holmes, Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)

“This brief and lovely volume forms a kind of retail diary, documenting Annie Ernaux’s impressions of life within Auchan, a big-box supermarket in the northwest Paris suburbs. She inhabits the space as an animal in a new ecosystem, producing a modern travel writing for those of us whose environments are wrapped in cellophane and offered at a price.”—Orion

“Brief but gripping. . . . Ernaux’s ambivalence for the supercenter is the ambivalence so many of us feel as we subsist in this world, contemplating the systems that intersect at the crossroads of our bodies, most often converging in the pocket where our wallets are kept.”—Laurel Taylor, Asymptote Journal

“An enjoyable take on the odd hub that the superstore is in modern society. . . . Ernaux’s observations make for an appealing little ramble.”—M. A. Orthofer, Complete Review

Praise for the French Edition:
 
“A wonderful addition to Annie Ernaux’s life writings . . . [and] a fascinating contribution to contemporary literature.”—Geneviève Alvarado, World Literature Today
 
“[A] beautiful book. . . . With rigor and tenderness, Annie Ernaux shows herself. . . . If she says ‘I,’ it is to hear others better. From the margins of a suburban superstore, she illuminates the heart of our lives.”—Jean Birnbaum, Le Monde

Kirkus Reviews

2023-01-12
The 2022 Nobel laureate ruminates on a year of shopping at her local big-box retailer.

"So, from November 2012 to October 2013,” writes Ernaux, “I made a record of most of my visits to the Auchan superstore in Cergy, where I usually go, for reasons of convenience and pleasure." Noting the role of the arts in determining what people find worth remembering, the author laments that superstores “are only starting to be considered as places worthy of representation.” Ernaux feels that conventional discourse about them is "tinged with aversion," which is not her take at all—even though, back in 1993, when she first began writing about the superstore "as a great human meeting place," she did so "with a certain sense of shame." These days, her feelings about Auchan are closer to those reflected by the book's title, a bit of overheard dialogue between a mother and child just in front of her on the moving walkway as they ascend toward "the lights and garlands hanging down like necklaces of precious stones." Ernaux mostly loves the place, though her approbation includes a cleareyed grasp of its mission, for example, as seen in the area of cultural diversity. "A few meters away, in the space set up for Ramadan, an ecstatic little boy holds a pack of dates stuffed with pink and green almond paste,” she writes. “Indifferent to the xenophobic fears of one part of society, the superstore adapts to the cultural diversity of its clientele, scrupulously keeping pace with their holidays. No ethics are involved, just ‘ethnic marketing.’ ” As the author scrutinizes the contents of other people's carts, they scrutinize hers as well, and she squirms a bit—even more so when she is recognized, which happens more than once. "I have to go down to Level 1,” she writes, “before I can recover my tranquility as an anonymous customer."

A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177990774
Publisher:	Yale Press Audio
Publication date:	04/04/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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