20th Century French Literary Biography, French Fiction, Women's Fiction, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Literary Styles & Movements - Fiction
Available on Bookshop
Write a review
Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon," begins Shame, the probing story of the twelve-year-old girl who will become the author herself, and the single traumatic memory that will echo and resonate throughout her life. With the emotionally rich voice of great fiction and the diamond-sharp analytical eye of a scientist, Annie Ernaux provides a powerful reflection on experience and the power of violent memory to endure through time, to determine the course of a life.
Editorials
Richard Bernstein
[An]. . .affecting wisp of a memoir. . . .Shame. . .is the mature woman's vision of herself at the moment when childhood innocence was replaced by shattering childhood terror. . . .[The book] contains . ..[a] sense of wonderment at the silently watching child that never really leaves us. — The New York TimesClaire Messud
The careful, unflinching specificities of Shame give voice to a resonant and universal truth; and Ernaux's particular discomfort is, most profoundly, that of being human. -- The New York Times Book ReviewL'Express
Shame is electrifying and overwhelming.Le Monde
Impeccable... Just as Simple Passion was a book about the desire to name, Shame is about wanting to know... All who wish to know a bit more about themselves must read Annie Ernaux.Richard Bernstein
[An]. . .affecting wisp of a memoir. . . .Shame. . .is the mature woman's vision of herself at the moment when childhood innocence was replaced by shattering childhood terror. . . .[The book] contains . ..[a] sense of wonderment at the silently watching child that never really leaves us. -- The New York TimesKirkus Reviews
Acclaimed French minimalist Ernaux, who has previously created docu-fictional versions of her past, now takes a violent incident from her childhood and turns it into a work of memory and meditation. On a Sunday in June after attending Mass, she witnessed her father try to kill her mother. The year was 1952, and the author was going on 12. Her parents had been quarreling and her father was reacting to her mother's provocations. For the child who saw the attempt, life would never be the same, for from that day on she became aware of the sensation of shame and of seeing all subsequent embarrassments as colored by that event. It becomes the explanatory figure in this very tiny literary carpet she weaves around it. Her family aspired to something better for themselves: She went to private school, her mother was a regular church attendee, and they lived in a respectable quarter of the town. Now they were no better than those they despised for drawing attention to themselves by behaving in uncouth ways. She describes what life was like in her native town in 1952: the fashions, the events, and the town itself. Next, she recalls the moments of shame that now shadow her life: A schoolteacher sees her mother in a soiled nightgown, and she has her own humiliating encounter with a snobbish young girl during a family trip to Lourdes. She notes all the rules her family and school expected her to observe. But, as the author learned, all these anxious acts of propitiation and obedience can be nullified in an instant—respectability, like civilization, is a very fragile fabric. Intense and relentlessly earnest, but as usual Ernaux excels at capturing the exact emotion of an event and anera.Book Details
Published
July 31, 1998
Publisher
Seven Stories Press,U.S.
Pages
114
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9781888363692