A novel that Annie Ernaux revealed a few months before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, about the relationship of a 50-year-old woman with a man 30 years her junior, arrives in Portugal at the end of this month. “’O Jovem’ is a key text in the work of Annie Ernaux, a small jewel finely chiseled over time and writing,” says Livros do Brasil, which publishes the author’s work.
Released in May of last year, the book has a portuguese edition on january 26which includes photographs from Annie Ernaux’s private archive, her biobibliography, and a reproduction of a handwritten page.
The story revolves around a woman in her 50s who becomes involved with a man nearly thirty years her junior, a relationship that transports her to the past and to a city she left behind. In this mental journey, between the enthusiasm of falling in love, the games of seduction and pleasure, and the stigmas generated by the difference in ages and social positions, the protagonist, who is the author herself, reflects on the “scandalous” girl that she was. , a girl from the provinces, from an environment that is no longer hers and that now, strangely, she recognizes in the other.
This “initiatory experience” that brought back to Annie Ernaux the memory of her first world is clearly present in phrases like the one in which she states: “He embodied the past. With him I went through all the stages of life, of my life”.
The stigma of the age difference, accentuated by the fact that the woman is the oldest member of the couple, is also explored by the author. “In front of A.’s face, mine was just as young. Men have known this all along, I didn’t see why they shouldn’t,” writes Annie Ernaux.
It is an “intimate and shameless account of a passion that is far from simple with a 25-year-old boy, who is therefore old enough to be his son”, in which he feels “the prejudice of others due to a difference in such a great age, the jealousy (of him, not hers), the voluptuousness never tasted before”, describes the editor.
“O joven” is the fifth title by Annie Ernaux published in the Dois Mundos collectionafter “A place in the sun followed by A woman”, “A simple passion”, “The event” and “The years”.
Born in Lillebonne, Normandy, in 1940, Annie Ernaux studied at the Universities of Rouen and Bordeaux, graduating in Modern Literature. She is currently considered one of the most important voices in French literature, standing out for her writing where autobiography and sociology, memory and the history of recent events merge.
Awarded the French Language Prize (2008), the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize (2017), the Formentor Prize for Literature (2019) and the Prince Pierre de Monaco Prize (2021) for her work, her books “Un lugar in the sun” (1984), winner of the Renaudot Prize, and “Os anos” (2008), winner of the Marguerite Duras Prize and finalist for the Man Booker International Prize.
Source: Observadora
