WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREOne of Annie Ernaux's most exciting and idiosyncratic works now in paperback for the first time. In this novel, which takes the form of journal entries made over the course of seven years, Annie Ernaux concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person's lived environment. She captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of a great city: tortured, chaotic, lyrical, and powerfully alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux's books--the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.
Exteriors is Ernaux for Ernaux fans - this is not a narrative but rather a collection of entries regarding every day life observed closely. This is also the first book I read by Ernaux - I was hooked by the writing style. Ernaux has the unusual ability to write prose that appears on the outside to be highly descriptive of the exterior of events. Yet in this careful observation, she portrays a highly interior response to the externals.The description of the clerk in the shopping mall has remained in my memory for years as has her description of the changing landscape of transit stations. Few authors could make such details interesting, even fewer make them significant. Ernaux succeeds at both.
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