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    A Man's Place
    A Man's Place
    A Man's Place
    Audiobook2 hours

    A Man's Place

    Written by Annie Ernaux and Tanya Leslie

    Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Annie Ernaux narrates her father's slow ascent into a more comfortable life and the lessons he gave her about the importance of manners and language.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media
    Release dateOct 8, 2019
    ISBN9781666579406
    A Man's Place
    Author

    Annie Ernaux

    Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  

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    Reviews for A Man's Place

    4/5

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    • 2/5
      Petit llibre amb gran contingut. Annie Ernaux ens fa unes pinzellades de son pare amb paraules senzilles però amb sentiments contradictoris (ens mostra son pare de prop i de lluny, com a filla i com a "burgesa", en contraposició a l'estatus dels seus pares, gent senzilla sentimentalment, culturalment i socialment, una "mitad del mundo para la cual la otra no es más que un decorado".
    • 4/5
      After the death of her father Ernaux decides to write his biography and looks back on her relationship with him. And while the biography itself is interesting enough, it is the class lens through which Ernaux filters everything: her parents are decidedly and proudly working class (farming stock, but they operate a café and a small grocery store), while she herself has gone on to enter middle class. That filter adds a layer of melancholy as the class distinction precludes full understanding -- neither her father nor Ernaux herself would want to walk in the other’s shoes -- and I thought it really elevated the book into Proper Literature. Good stuff.
    • 3/5
      The is my first novel to Annie Ernaux ,she mixes both formal and slang language in a unique way,i cant say i like it,but it was new for me,she wrote with her own special writing style,very smooth not complicated at all....and narrates in an open and honest way...
      a short autobiography about the life of her father and her relation to him until his death....
      her childhood memories, the strange image she hold for her father ,love and at the same time embarrassment of his habits as a peasant....
      although he was an ambitious hard working man,who manged to have his own cafe ,she still ashamed of his poor education and looking down at him,and thinks that he was jealous that she could got a better education than he have got,and even think that he get angry when he sees her reading......
      she developed a humiliated portrait of a father...
      so many complexities and psychological problems of the father daughter relationship....
      her marriage which was for her a desire to change her former social class .....


    • 4/5
      In many ways this is a simple story, told in the first person as a sort of autobiography of the authors early life. She starts when she has recently passed her practical examination to become a Professor and she writes home to her parents with the good news. Her mother replies that her father is ill. This causes Annie to think about her parents lives and in particular about her father. He came from a very poor family and had to leave school at 14 years to become a cowherd on a local farm. He was too young to fight in the first world war, but the lack of men enabled him to get a job in a factory. He was a good worker and saved hard until he could afford to get married and eventually to buy a small grocer’s shop with a cafe attached. Annie was the only child that survived and she remembers her early life helping out sometimes in the cafe. Annie studied hard at school passing examinations and getting a scholarship so that she left her parents far behind. She has become part of the bourgeoise while her parents have remained firmly working class. The difference in life styles and in expectations gets progressively bigger as Annie grows up and then away from home. Annie is married with a child of her own, her husband cannot stand visiting her parents, the banality of their existence upsets him and Annie realises that the gap cannot be breached. She can and does return to her parents during her fathers final illness and does what she can to help, but she now comes from a different world. The strength of this short novel (113 pages) comes from the way that Ernaux uses the words and phrases that her parents would have used and in the closely observed situations that she describes. The paragraphs are short and seem to float freely and she manages to say an awful lot without using too many words. One gets the feeling that every word in this novel has been thought through and weighed carefully for its effect. It goes without saying that the world created/remebered of a small town in Normandy (France) feels absolutely right. This short novel may be slight, but it is beautifully formed and so four stars.
    • 5/5
      A short, beautifully clear and (superficially) simple analysis by a daughter of the way she perceives and perceived her father's life, across the generation- and class- gap that divides them. The father was a Normandy peasant boy, born before the First World War, who has managed to work his way up to become the proud owner of a small café-grocery; the daughter has grown up in the forties and fifties to go to university and become a teacher of literature, and thus automatically middle-class, with quite different tastes and values from her working-class parents. Her obvious admiration for her father's toughness and determination is mixed up with her guilt about the patronising element that comes into her view of his attitudes and aspirations. And of course it's all complicated by her memory of the affectionate moments they shared in her childhood, and her sadness at witnessing his illness and death. Superb writing, and a topic I found very interesting because there are so many echoes there of the way people of my parents' generation related to their working-class parents.