The Nobel Prize in Literature is that award we would like to see given exclusively to our favorite writer. When the Swedish Academy rules against the prose we consider excellent, our liver fills with stones and one begins to grumble about gender, race, or political correctness quotas that have ended up weaving a forced decoration (in the case of the unfortunate tribe, we always add the whiny coda that the oppressed nation should have at least one statuette, even at the risk of it being given to the insufferable bore Jaume Cabré). When the Swedes announced Annie Ernaux's Nobel, I repeated the grimace, and not only because I hate the French with all the strength I am capable of –undisputed leaders of this literary crown above America and the United Kingdom–, but also due to the manifest injustice of having left my adored Pascal Quignard without laurel who, although very French, turns out to be, together with the already awarded JM Coetzee, the best writer on planet Earth by a sidereal difference.
Adding to the injustice of not adhering to my particular taste, the Nobel for Ernaux became even harder for me to digest due to the fact that the writer is an undisputed idol of our national feminism, which celebrated the decision as a milestone of literary-uterine pride. But reading her, I saw that Ernaux turns out to be a much more solid literary voice than the turrafandom she provokes and, of course, than my childish prejudices; her ambassadors in our house are my dear Rosa Rey, editor of Angle, and the tireless translator Valèria Gaillard. Once I read three of the novels they have published (Els anys, Pura passió and L'esdeveniment), I believe that Ernaux's literary strength is indisputable. Of the author, above all, I was surprised precisely by her scarce stylistic Frenchness when it came to dwelling on memory. However traumatic the experience of an abortion or a leisurely sexual adventure may be, Ernaux delves into the memory of things as if she distrusted the mechanism itself and had to save it by describing it with a prose as clinical as it is wounding.
This is how the artist can write a torrential culture-vulture memoir like Els anys through the descriptive summation of history, philosophical notes, and obsessions of her generation, practically as if she were looking at herself from afar, reviewing a photo album (Anna Punsoda made me notice that, rhetoric aside, Ernaux is more French than a baguette because, deep down, her string of experiences is configured as a strict summary of the grandeur and, in turn, ends up perfectly describing a journey that takes her from the marginal outskirts to becoming a proper Parisian). This approach to memory is of Proustian heritage, of course, but Ernaux transforms the gaze into the past into a methodical description so icy that it produces a terrifying effect. Her prose reaches authentically demented goals in L'esdeveniment, a text that overturns the heroism and self-torture involved in interrupting a pregnancy, squeezing out the pain with a unique style that can only be achieved after much pruning of the prose.
What surprised me most about the author, above all, was precisely her scarce stylistic Frenchness when it came to dwelling on memory."I felt a violent urge to shit. I ran to the toilet across the hall, and squatted in front of the toilet, facing the door. I could see the tiles between my thighs. I pushed with all my might. It shot out like a grenade and splashed up to the door when it hit the water. I saw a doll hanging from my sex at the end of a bloody string. I had never imagined I would see that in myself. I had to walk back to the room. I grabbed it with one hand –it had a strange heaviness– and walked down the hall compressing it between my thighs. I was an animal." This approach to the past has particularly pleased me in Pure passion, a very interesting text because it focuses on sexual hustle and bustle (a literary topic usually narrated from the prose of the man who has the female at his free disposal) through the eyes of the woman who waits for him at home, devoted with such a brutal submission that it provokes a mixture of disbelief and vicarious shame in the reader (especially the male one).
"When he called me to see each other, his call awaited a thousand times, nothing changed, I remained immersed in the same painful tension as before. I had entered a state where even the reality of his voice failed to make me happy. Nothing made sense, except for the moment we were together making love. And even then I was obsessed with the moment after, when he would be gone. I lived pleasure as a future pain." I would say that fragments like these are transcendent not only in terms of descriptive excellence; they are also interesting, I insist, in the catharsis they can provoke in a testicular reader. I understand that Ernaux's fans want to defend her as a writer for all sexes, of course, but I believe it is especially cathartic for males to get used to reading literaturized experiences that come from the other side. While reading this Pure Passion I experienced a notorious discomfort, and it must be said that I had spent a long time reading complacent texts without having suffered a similar emotional breakdown.
Only for this fact, and because reading should force us to think differently and place us on a different plane of vision of things and affections, I recommend reading this fair Nobel and I am ashamed of my stupid reservations (in fact, you tell me who the hell I am to go around dealing cards of poetic justice). That said, gentlemen of Sweden; Quignard is better.