Shame

by

111 pages

English language

Published Jan. 8, 1998 by Seven Stories Press.

ISBN:
978-1-888363-69-2
Copied ISBN!
OCLC Number:
38132630

View on OpenLibrary

(2 reviews)

"My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon." Shame begins as the story of a twelve-year-old girl, but it is also about the storyteller, a mature woman, the author herself. The violent moment lives inside her. The trauma comes at a moment when she is still so close to her mother and father that the threatened act of violence is incomprehensible. It cuts through her like an axe.

Over time, the memory cools until it is just a snapshot she carries in her purse, unchanging even after years have passed and the twelve-year-old girl has grown into an orgasmic woman and a writer. Years later the cut is still there, but her whole being has grown around it like a tree that has been struck by lightning and survived.

3 editions

reviewed Shame by Annie Ernaux

An event that lived

Annie Ernaux explains how shame has influenced her life in a short memoir. It begins with the climax: 'My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon'. From there, Ernaux explores her rural childhood in a post-war French village, and how this event and the fear of community shame stayed with her even nearly 50 years later.

It's hard to criticise something so personal, but the language is a little mechanical, perhaps because of the numbness created over time. It is also hard to understand the motivation for the book being published (I often feel this with memoirs so it may be my bias), but it did paint an interesting picture of a community that lived on gossip and thus hid their lives, something I have seen in my own life.

avatar for niechec

rated it

Subjects

  • Ernaux, Annie, 1940- -- Childhood and youth
  • Authors, French -- 20th century -- Biography