I Will Write To Avenge My People by Annie Ernaux (The Nobel Lecture)

Seven Stories Press, 2022; translated by Alison L. Strayer, Sophie Lewis & Kim Loughran

It’s been a little while since I’ve read any Annie Ernaux, and though I loooooved the books of hers I read a few years ago, I got a little bit put off continuing diving into her oeuvre when it became apparent that people with terrible taste in books and culture were championing her quite intensely online.

It’s childish, though, that impulse to step away from a cultural product or cultural producer once they hit the mainstream. It’s a reactionary and immature response to someone achieving success and though, of course, as the vast majority of people are unrepentantly awful, it is worth remembering that anything genuinely popular is probably also genuinely (at best) mediocre, but at the same time there are occasions when something transcendental doesn’t transcend the bestseller lists and ends up, through the power of capturing universalising human experience (or (perhaps more realistic now) getting promoted by someone with a huge and obedient following), on bookshelves the middle class world over.

The Nobel Prize for Literature can rightly be criticised for ignoring a lot of important writers and rewarding some people whose literary legacies barely extended past their deaths (no shade on that, my literary legacy didn’t make it from my early thirties to my mid-thirties!), but it can also fairly be praised for – probably well over 50% of the time – actually giving the award to people who write genuinely brilliant literature.

Ernaux – the laureate in 2022 – is one of those examples of a writer winning the world’s most prestigious literary prize (except in America, where the Pulitzer is probably considered the “world’s” most prestigious literary prize) whose victory is hard to argue against.

Ernaux writes very real literature exploring the twentieth century with a blunt directness, a clarity and a [sense of] honesty that makes a resonance that has – rightly – been noticed.

Her books are books with something serious at their core, yet are engaging, are human, are real. I should really read some more of them…

In the meantime, though, I picked up this one, mostly because I didn’t want to accidentally go two weeks without posting anything here again (not because anyone would miss the posts other than me, but I do feel quite detached from myself when I’m not posting my thoughts without filter onto a blog that remains (somehow!) read (or at least looked at for long enough for the analytics to register a view) by thousands of people every month, and I’m very busy at the moment moving house, preparing to have a baby and still trying to exist as a person) and because this book is really really really really really really small.

This book contains four pieces of writing, all (I think) translated by a different person. One of them is the essay the book is named for, which was the speech that Ernaux gave at the Nobel ceremony, and this is a great piece of writing about the importance of persistence in the Arts, of self-knowledge and, crucially, of the understanding and wisdom that has powered the writer’s long and acclaimed career in the world of literature.

Ernaux, here, discusses privilege and chauvinism, class and discrimination, she discusses politics and cruelty, and she discusses art and violence and life.

It’s a great essay.

However… It’s only about twelve pages long. And is here published as a whole (albeit tiny) book.

One of the other pieces is a 100-word “speech” that Ernaux gave at a Nobel banquet, which basically amounts to “thank you for inviting me to dinner”, one of the pieces is someone from the Nobel committee basically doing the same thing, while the fourth is the introduction to Ernaux’s speech, which is a brief description of why she has been awarded the prize, but does feel (and likely was!) largely cribbed from the official Author Bio found in most standard publications of Ernaux!

Is the brief Ernaux essay in here worth the price of a book? I mean the answer to this is basically yes… Yes, basically, it has to be, but packaging it with the Nobel-related bumpf rather than with other addresses or speeches Ernaux has given (which is surely how this piece of writing will be published in the longer term (if books continue to exist for another century or two)) feels a little … Cheeky.

I mean, I bought it. Other people have probably bought it, too. So the cynical marketing decision was borne out by reality..

And It’s worth a read, of course it is, especially if, like me, you weren’t invited to 2022’s Nobel ceremony… But the entire oeuvre of Annie Ernaux probably is more worthy of attention. And I should really be reading that …

Or not, I don’t know where it is. All my possessions are in boxes. Everything else is in-