Retour à Yvetot par Annie Ernaux (review)

Boyer creates parasites (static that interferes with communication), embedding a fragmented conversation within a fragmented news report. He creates a structure en entonnoir (in this instance, a diminishing series) with a superimposed narrative progression. Then he introduces more shocking contrasts than before, or new forms. Boyer’s Goût du suicide lent (1999) tries to elevate the sordid to the level of the sublime. It is less a montage (a preplanned constellation of elements) than a collage, seeking, above all, the unusual. One comes away feeling that such a strenuous pursuit of eccentricity—like others described in this volume—disqualifies itself by straining to startle hoi polloi who, however, placidly persist in chewing their cud, not even paying the tribute of an upward glance. Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar (OH) Laurence M. Porter Ernaux, Annie. Retour à Yvetot. Paris: Mauconduit, 2013. ISBN 979-10-90566-08-8. Pp. 78. 9 a. Betrayal of one’s social class is a steep price paid for education in the lower social classes. Simply stated, this theme lies below the surface of Ernaux’s writings. Ernaux married into a bourgeois setting and left behind her father’s peasant and workingclass conditions. In La honte (1997) and La vie extérieure (2000), my favorites of her published writings, shame has the effect of a palimpsest, revealing traces of a former text that has not been thoroughly replaced but is barely legible just below the surface. While the title of the pamphlet being reviewed appears to indicate the subject as Ernaux’s return to the Norman village of Yvetot, in fact Ernaux probes the surface of Yvetot’s present site to explore the theme of betrayal reiterated throughout her writings . Therein,Yvetot often becomes Y which she characterizes as“une ville mythique” (18). Thus Yvetot recalls for Ernaux and her readers what was Balbec for Proust the writer and otherwise reminds Ernaux of the betrayal of things such as the smell of l’eau de Javel, a bleach-like universal household cleaner preferred by her mother at home and at the family café-épicerie. To mock the young Ernaux’s inferior background, la Javel became the expression used by those of superior ambitions as they condescended to refer to the distinctive smell in Ernaux’s clothing as recalling housework. In Ernaux’s case, her parents were climbing the social ladder, so they sent their daughter to the local parish school of Saint-Michel rather than the public school. Saint-Michel was where she encountered all sorts of social class privileges. Students humiliated her typically with such advantages as their vacations abroad, classical music recordings, and fine clothes. Reading was an especially double-edged sword at this school. Ernaux’s mother loved to read and passed on the gift to her daughter. But the Church objected to books, especially novels, as a source of moral threat because of the encouragement reading thus gave to independent thinkers. At Saint-Michel, Annie learned precision in French language and the accompanying loss of popular regional 266 FRENCH REVIEW 88.4 Reviews 267 expressions in argot. She especially loved reading and appreciated literary language. She assumed the role of a writer when her father died in 1967 with the mission of her writing to explore the social issues in how to “écrire littérairement dans la langue de tous” (34). The disparities among the values of different social classes have thus been imbedded in her writings and led her to explore the degree to which she has or has not betrayed her origins. Retour à Yvetot includes the revision of a lecture Ernaux gave at Yvetot in 2012, pictures of Ernaux at various stages in her life, an interview given to the Ernaux scholar Marguerite Cornier, and an essay by Gortier explaining the role of Yvetot throughout Ernaux’s opus. This pamphlet has much to recommend its reading by those familiar with the écrivaine and especially by those not yet acquainted with her work. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Farrugia, Guilhem. Bonheur et fiction chez Rousseau. Paris: Garnier, 2012. ISBN 9782 -8124-0500-6. Pp. 361. 39 a. “Peut-on, après Robert Mauzi, écrire sur le bonheur selon Rousseau?,”asks Michel Delon...