Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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The photos in Ernaux and Marie’s book attest to love’s urgency while also suggesting its eventual devastation. THE USE OF PHOTOGRAPHY , by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie. Translated by Alison L. Strayer. Men have repeatedly lectured me about Annie Ernaux. “You must read ‘ The Years ,’” a date once told me, responding to the homage I’d written , staying up all night in a Swiss hotel room, upon learning that this writer whose work I’d admired for decades had been awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature . (In the piece, I mentioned that “The Years” lay unopened on my bedside table at home.) Well, I can now report that “The Years,” with its layers of autobiography nestled like Matryoshka dolls within a broader portrait of the French postwar generation, is an anomaly in Ernaux’s oeuvre. In the main, her work consists of slender volumes, knifelike in their intensity and pared-down precision as they focus on the material conditions, unspoken truths and (at times) lacerating emotions of one particular woman’s life. “The Use of Photography,” Ernaux’s most recent work to make it into English — deftly translated by Alison L. Strayer — is also an anomaly: a photo essay published in France in 2005 and co-authored with the journalist and photographer Marc Marie, who died in 2022. In the opening pages, Ernaux explains the work’s genesis. She and Marie, acquaintances, had dined together in a Left Bank restaurant on Jan. 22, 2003. He’d recently broken up with his live-in girlfriend. He wasn’t aware, at first, that Ernaux was undergoing treatment for breast cancer, with an operation scheduled for the coming week. She sprung the news of her diagnosis on him suddenly, noting to herself (with a certain satisfaction) that he didn’t flinch at the revelation. The book’s images are the opposite of pornographic, leaving nearly everything to the imagination. They spent that night together and an affair ensued, as intense as it was unlikely, unfolding primarily in Ernaux’s house in Cergy (a Paris suburb), with brief excursions abroad when she was able to travel. One morning early […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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