Translate This! Episode 2

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux

This is our second episode and our first discussion of a novel from French: A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, which is a biography of the author’s father, and a historical account of the material realities of life in France during the first two thirds of the 21st century. Annie Ernaux was the 2022 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

You can listen to the audio recording or read the transcript that follows.

JINWOO

Welcome back to Translate This! My name is Jinwoo Park.

LAURENCE

And my name is Laurence Miall. Happy to be back for Episode Two.

JINWOO

We got to work on that, yeah? The little one, two. It's a bit of a delay here. Yeah. For this episode, we picked, well, you picked a book called A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in literature, correct?

LAURENCE

That's right. Annie Ernaux won it in 2022. The last author we discussed, Han Kang, won it in 2024. So we are going with some big names here.

JINWOO

Yes. Heavy hitters. Let's just start this off. I'll just say this. I thought this was going to be a very fast read because it's so short, but then it wasn't a fast read because it required so much of your attention while you read it. It was really dense and packed for a book that just looked like, look at this. Look at this. It's barely what? 90 pages, I think? Like 90 pages of actual reading material, 80 pages maybe. It's short but impactful. I think that really tells you how much strength, how much literary strength her words carry. Overall, it was one of those things that made me go like, Wow, people live like this? That was less than 100 years ago. What? In many ways, it was an eye-opening book. But I think this is also one of those books where you just have to go through it again and again and find new meanings because there's so much just compacted into it. She's basically writing out her father's biography. I think actually we should probably go over that, what the book is actually about. Do you want to give us a little synopsis of the book?

LAURENCE

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it is a short book, as you say, but it covers a huge time period, because if I'm correct, Annie Ernaux's father lived from 1899 to 1967. She gets a bit into the life of her respective grandparent parents, even. That's where, I think when you mentioned people really lived like this, it's really remarkable. She says at one point, when she reads Marcel Proust, she can't really believe that he's writing about the same time period that her grandparents were living in, because for them, it might as well have been the middle ages. Her father grew up sleeping on straw above a stables for a while. So it's really covering a huge span of time. It's effectively from the late 19th century, two-thirds of the way through the 20th century. It is a biography, but it's very sociological. It's just before we kicked off the recording earlier today, I was looking at some of the brief descriptions of Annie O'Neill's writing, and it's been described as sociological. I think you could even call it anthropological. I think that the approach that she brings to quite a few of her books is you're always focused on a central character.

JINWOO

Oftentimes, the central character is a proxy, I think, for Annie Ernaux herself. Definitely, this is narrated by someone who is a proxy for Annie Ernaux. But in addition to that central focus on that story, you get all of the history and cultural and social context around that central through line. That's how it is with this book, A Man's Place. That's why I picked it to discuss today, because I think it is one of the most reviewed revealing and intense descriptions of the 20th century that we have in contemporary literature.

LAURENCE

Yeah, and I think in a way, too, that's why it really struck me because this is also reflective of a lot of what I have known about my father, which is that my country, my home country, and his home country, too, Korea saw a massive, massive change from 1945 to the current times, just unrecognizable. And within that time, his role as a man constantly changed and was challenged by those changing times. And that's what's happening in the book as he experiences this turmoil from almost a medieval-like existence towards... And as he's getting hurled through industrialization and wars and all this struggle to raise a family and everything like that, you see a man who's just really barely catching up at any point until he is left to dry out towards the end. That's how I felt. He was getting dried out towards the end It was very... The final pages were very melancholic to read because you see this empty shell of a man who's literally given everything And that's the two. To what extent? What has he given his life for? You begin to question because was it the cafe? Was it his daughter?

JINWOO

Who was it for? What was it for. And there's this imagery, I think on page 73, where he basically catches wasps off the window panes with his handkerchief, and then he throws them on the burner of the coal stove and the wasps die twisting and turning while their bodies are being slowly consumed. And I thought that is a fitting metaphor for the entire book. A man is getting consumed slowly, twisting and turning, struggling while they're literally just slowly dying throughout their entire life. I thought that was a very fitting metaphor.

LAURENCE

Yeah, that's a dark comparison there that you're making. And I had not thought of that, but that is a very striking scene. And I'm glad you mentioned that part, too, because I think this is what's so striking about Annie, is she acts so much descriptive detail into every page, and it really does stick with you. I was actually going to just mention her approach here because you say, what was it all for this very hard life that he had. Annie Ernaux says at the beginning of this book, she says, If I wish to tell the story of a life governed by necessity, I have no right to adopt an artistic approach or attempt to produce something moving or gripping. What she's telling us there is she's not going to try to make a narrative that makes you feel good. She's not going to depict her father as the hero who overcame all of these struggles and succeeded in the end. Although, in fact, there are some of those elements there because he was born to incredible poverty. He had a little bit of education, and then it was like he was pulled out of school so that he could be a farm laborer.

His father hated to see anybody reading a book ever because their life was governed by necessity. He really comes from very, very humble beginnings. I think if this was an American movie, we would see a bit of a rags to riches story, but we don't get that in a man's place. I mean, Ernaux doesn't console us with any of this stuff. What he succeeds in doing is eventually opening his own business with his wife. That's their biggest accomplishment. They It's a grocery/cafe. They're always very hand-to-mouth. It's very difficult to make any profit. There's no question of them expanding it. There's no question of them as really… They feel that they've moved out of a working class. I think that that's something that's really important to note here, that in their world, being working class is to literally go work for somebody else. As soon as you've managed to go beyond that and you run your own business, you've escaped. That's the central accomplishment of Annie Ernaux's parents. And I guess the other big accomplishment is raising their daughter. And I think that that's a big part of this that even though you never get the sense that they set her up to be a prodigy, this, again, not a heartwarming story of how they poured everything into this daughter who became some phenomenal star, she becomes a teacher.

That's as far as Annie Ernaux's memoir goes here. And she effectively becomes a high school teacher over the course of this time. But she already is so far beyond her parents in terms of her level of education that there is then a bit of a communication gap between her and her father. They no longer speak exactly the same language because her father continues to speak like Normandy Argot, and she's obviously We've gone beyond that, and it speaks perfectly good middle-class French. That's part of the evolution here. I'm curious to know what else you picked up on.

JINWOO

I think in any piece of text, I think I tried to seek a raison d'être. Why does this exist? Why does this piece of text exist? In a way, I wondered Is this a deeply personal thing where she feels that she owes her father a proper send-off as well as a legacy by writing into the pages what he actually… Just who he was without embellishment, so that there is more of an objective and unbiased look into how his life was as much as possible, because it is a very unembellished piece of work, this autobiographical piece of fiction. But having said that, I think it's also, in a way, very… It's a telling portrait of many fathers, I think, in similar circumstances, where they're just hit by needs. They're just in a series of needs, and they don't actually think about wants. That's why it's called a man's place, right? It's the place that they should be. Because places are not chosen. They're given to you. They're basically set for you. Because that is what the meaning usually is, to put someone in their place or to know your place. A place is a position necessity.

Nobody goes, gets himself into a place by wanting to be there. I think it was a portrait of a man or anyone really, whose life was dominated by needs, not wants. I know this so well because I see it in my own father, who is so restless, has lived through his life essentially through a series of needs to do things, obligations, responsibilities, liabilities, whose life is moved not by motivation, but more by the desire to avoid shame. That is a huge theme in this book, the desire to avoid shame. He has he always wants to say face. I think that was how I saw this book, this dual purpose of Annie Ernaux, basically outlining a portrait of her father, but also outlining a portrait of a certain man that was very prevalent, and it's still prevalent nowadays in our society. I mean, I don't know. How would you explain this book from that point of view, from a more like an anthropological point of view?

LAURENCE

Well, this is a book about a man who, were it not for the fact that Annie Ernaux wrote about him, he would disappear from the historical record. It's not when you go to the Louver or any other fancy museum and you see the monuments and the paintings of the Opera C and people who've just been able to be remembered because of the power that they held and the riches they held or whatever. In this respect, Annie Ernaux, she's 84 years old. I think it's worthwhile pointing out. And so she's a rough contemporary of Elena Ferrante. Actually, those two remind me a lot of each other, even though they write very different kinds of books. I mean, Elena Ferrante's most famous series, the Neapolitan Quartet, is enormous, and Annie Ernaux's books are usually not enormous at all. But what they do have in common is this huge historical sweep of time that they cover. Another thing that I think is very similar is that Neapolitan quartet has a character, in this case, it's a woman who, were it not for the fact that she was written about, would have disappeared. You have the two central women, Lenu and Lila, if I'm pronouncing them correctly, and one disappears, which I think is to mean that she disappeared because she was not historically important enough to be remembered.

That is definitely true of this man. In reflecting on the title, and we have this discussion before recording, in French, it's just la place, so we don't get that meaning that we get in English, that it is a man's place, and you can have the double meaning there, like what is his place in society and the physical place that he occupies. Both meanings are implied. But I think that through Annie and all more worldly, educated perspective on him and where he lives, that the family comes from somewhere that actually would have a certain amount of beauty and Significance, but I want to just read this very briefly. She says, The land my father worked belonged to others. He saw no beauty in it. The magnificence of Mother Earth and other such myths were lost on him. Again, it's a life governed by necessity, and you may be surrounded by all these wonderful things. But when your life is this hard and you are constantly having to improvise what you're going to do This is a man who did not go into any of this with a plan, aside from, I'm going to open a business.

That was the plan. I think, to me, the struggle that you see, he luckily escaped being in either of the World Wars, which is a big deal, right? He's too young for World War I, too old for World War II. But during World War II, he's already opened the grocery a battery store by this point, but it's looted. I don't know, she doesn't go into a huge amount of detail to what extent it's damaged, but he effectively has to rebuild it, and he has nothing else besides a bicycle and a car. Annie has to cycle there and back 30 kilometers every week to go get the provisions, haul them back in the car behind his bicycle, replenish the store, and just go back to doing that. That's just one case of many where you just sense the struggle all the time, but it's struggle on a small enough scale that, again, if it were not for Annie, it never would have been recognized or written Yeah, I think that's something that a lot of people also underestimate.

JINWOO

As someone who's... My family had a series of stores when we were just fresh immigrants, and that everyday labor really kills you. It really does. It just wears you down gradually. Reading those passages, I thought to myself, this is a hard life. This is a hard life in many, many ways because you're in an in-between place. You're not completely, completely poverty-ridden. Because at least if you're defeated, then that in itself could be a peace, a sense There could be a sense of peace. For instance, the grandfather, Anir Noa's father's father, in a way, that man was less anxious than Anir Noa's father because he was not trying to get out of his place. He was basically saying, You know what? This is my lot, whatever. Screw it. But the thing is, Annie Orno's father was neither in that place where it was comfortable enough that he could be secure that, Yeah, I've crossed to the other side. I'm a middle class or upper middle class now, and I don't have to worry about anything. He was always in that between place where he was trying so hard to get to here, the next point, but was always sliding so closely back to where he had started.

That is where real suffering is, in my opinion. That place that you're always stuck, that in between place. That was where that was really visible to me, that idea of that in between. In between the classes. This is also why when he realizes that after his operation, he cannot influence his position anymore because he tells himself that... So Annie or Noe writes that he lost his pride at the age of 52, and he says, I'm useless now. That essentially distills a lot of feelings that he was probably feeling at the time, having been a man.

LAURENCE

I don't want to say given up feels too strong, but the idea that his business would ever get any bigger, that they were ever reach any more customers or have a second location or any of that stuff that could have provided some measure of enduring security. That dream is definitely over. I think it's completely accurate to say that there is no intergenerational wealth built in this. There is nothing to hand down to Annie Ernaux's generation because the changing economic times that they live in have basically made that an impossibility because the big supermarket has moved into town. This is a story that is repeated over and over again. I mean, in the American context, we would say, Okay, there was a small town that had a thriving Main Street, and then one by one, all of the businesses closed down because Walmart moved into the periphery of town, and that was that. Everybody went there after that point. That story is happening here, except that you could be sure that Annie Irma's father is going to keep the business for as long as he lives. But after he and his wife... Well, his wife closes it down.

It's said very clearly at the end of the book that that's it. It's turned into some residential property. With that, you have an entire chapter of the socioeconomic development of much of the Western world. You have the ability for small business owners to make it, and you can tell that in the span of a couple of generations, fewer and fewer of them are going to be able to survive, let alone thrive. We turn a chapter on that stage of history, which is, again, why I find this book in its own way, Annie Ernaux said she didn't try to make a moving and gripping book, but it definitely is moving because this is a book about an era that has passed.

JINWOO

Yeah. I mean, that's also in a way where this book has its... As you said, that anthropological value, which is it's an observation of the times that are changing where this happened and that happened, and this is how people reacted, and that's it. Take it or leave it. What do you think of it? We don't know. It's up to everyone's reaction because the way I see this and the way you're going to see this is different. I wonder how… Because this is a very different portrait from for instance, your typical millennial is feeling these days. Because this is a portrait where a child is looking at their parent and thinking, Yeah, my parents had a tough life, but I've been given a better life as a result. Or as somehow, through whatever reason, I have been given a better result. Which is a very jarring experience nowadays, which is that the typical Western and millennials's experience or the Gen Z experience is that my parents had a great, I'm about to face an oblivion. What the hell do I do? I think in that sense, it's a very good look back at the fact that these roles used to be actually reversed.

We have to remember that. We used to be in a society that basically said each subsequent generation should be better than the I think we're forgetting that. I think reading this is a good reminder that this is how things used to be. Things are much better now. We don't poop in a hole anymore, guys. That in itself is so great.

LAURENCE

Well, neither of us do. You've got some strange people who'd still rather use a hole. Actually, in France, they used to literally... The toilet used to be a hole. You'd walk into a French cafe back in the '80s, and I'm regrettably old. Oh, damn. I remember the '80s, and it would be a hole. But I know what you mean. No one's digging a hole in the dirt and then pooping in it and covering it. We've evolved, and we have a lot more stuff. I like Annie because she's a real materialist. She looks at the clothes and the books and the magazines and stores and everything. She mentions his Opinel knife. I have an Opinel knife that I bought when I was in France. It's a classed knife. It closes up. It's very sharp. It's very practical. That's his knife. She does an inventory of all of those things that they have. Many of those products are French and would have been made in France at that time. I think that as we've shifted into a different economic era, that that would, again, be less and less the case. Many of those things would no longer be made in France anymore.

JINWOO

But also in behavior. If you remember, there's a scene where he cleans the knife by putting it in dirt. You remember that? I thought to myself, Oh, this is that time. Wow, this is long ago, but not really.

LAURENCE

It also gets the smell off. I forget the particular food that he eats that gives it a weird smell. It gives the knife a bad smell. And so, yeah, he puts it in the air to clean it, to get rid of the smell. It's just, I don't know many people who really live that way anymore.

JINWOO

But, yeah, Yeah. But that's the thing. I think that these are the kinds of details I also really appreciate it because, like I said, these are the details that get lost, right? Like, unless they're written down, unless they're remembered. And I think in that sense, that's why I feel like it's also very timeless, because the interpretations of this book is numerous. And to look at this book and say, Oh, this book is about class, or this book is about, I don't know, men, or something, would be too narrow. There are so many things in this book that tell each person like you and me, something different based on our own unique backgrounds that I think the book itself... I mean, it's also the reason why her writing is so resonating because of these qualities.

LAURENCE

I think that's it. The Nobel Prize, I think... Before she got the Nobel Prize, this is when I was still on the platform formerly known as Twitter, and a lot of literary people were saying, Well, she's going to win it this year. She's going to win it because she's a clear favorite. She's written such a lot of work, and she occupies a really important place in French culture because of having documented the times that she's lived in. I think that this book really stands out because in France, the post-war period generally gets wrapped up as we call Les Trente Glorieuses, the 30 wonderful years, great years, whatever you want to call them. And it is a time of incredible rising prosperity. This book documents some of that. It's a move to universal education, universal health care, a general sense of the social safety net catching people who previously would have been sleeping on straw above animals in a barn. That's the staggering thing that Ernaux has done here, is she has reminded everybody where they came from and just how difficult it was. You're right, millennials might pick up this book and find it jarring because it's a bit we make the... We have so many material comforts now. I think that's beyond dispute, but we can raise the question, where are we going next? Is it going to be any better?

JINWOO

I think in that way… I don't know if this is something that Annie Ernaux intended, but the way she ended the book, where she noticed at a cashier, a student of hers who did not work… It did not work out at a technical school after whatever I guess in her case, elementary. What is it? What teacher was she?

LAURENCE

She was a high school teacher.

JINWOO

So after high school. I feel like there's this hint at the the physical nature of these sufferings. You know what I mean? It was a perfect closure for me. I was like, Yeah, but now we're back to manual labor now. That thing. It doesn't always get better. Sometimes we go back, and that's why we got to look back at our former generations and look back at what they did to not forget the thing we have, the times that we have, the good times that we think we have, It can all go down very quickly, or it doesn't have to be better. That's the thing. We have to be thankful for the places that we get, that we get to go to. I think that's why I thought the way it ended, it was perfect.

That was like this student who is obviously not having the time of their life. Nothing didn't work out. Because I thought about it. I was like, Why end it this way? Why end the book this way? I wondered what if she meant to say that this is a cycle, this cycle of one's place shifting around, it can go better, it can go worse. We're certainly seeing that now. Many people's places are heading towards worse. And that is really the source of many of our current political turmoil. It's because of those places sliding back down the hill.

LAURENCE

It's true, and it's very hard to go backwards. I think people can reconcile themselves to having struggled in childhood or earlier periods of their life through their 20s, as long as they feel that they are going towards a better place. To go backwards is really challenging or to see someone like the social class of this cashier where maybe it could have gotten better, but it didn't. She is a bit stuck. I think that that is the detail where Annie Ernaux, sometimes somebody might pick up a book by her and go, well, it's not ornate. It's not got a lot of pyrotechnics and literary razzle-dazzle in it, but it's her choice of details that really makes her one of the greats. As we're wrapping up here, I think you have to admire that discipline and eagle-eyed, ruthless perspective that she has on life.

JINWOO

It is admirable how she is neutral on her father. There is.... There are a lot of moments where she just basically says things, but does not lay judgment on those things. Or at least if she does, it's very held back. I very much respect that because our nature is to try to make sense of things, all right? Our nature is to try to find meaning. Our nature is to try to find some sense of what does this mean in the greater perspective. Well, I feel like through this, I just felt like one of those answers is that there doesn't have to be a meaning. There doesn't have to be.

LAURENCE

It's sometimes just harsh It really is. Not to be a downer for everyone as we come to the end of this episode, but sometimes life is just life, and that's how it is.

JINWOO

And that is a man's place, “la place.” It's just sometimes it's the lot that you get and you just do whatever you can with it. And I think that really is what I took from the book, really. At the end of the day, it's just like we just are placed somewhere.

LAURENCE

There's a book for children, and I read it to my daughter, my elder daughter, sometimes. You get what you get, and you don't complain. That's very Annie Ernaux-esque to say something like that.

JINWOO

It's very un-American, isn't it? It's very un-North American because the North American philosophy is you reject what you get and go for the better thing, no matter what. But in this case, in that way also, it's like, I think this is why this is this will probably come across as a very strange novel or whatever it is, an autobiographical work to Americans because this is a very strange concept.

LAURENCE

But I think given the way the world is moving, I think it's everyone's duty to actually rush out and buy a man's place by Annie Ernaux so they will have a more clear-eyed perspective on just how things can be. And so, yeah, with that, do you want to say a bid farewell to everybody?

JINWOO

Yeah, of course. Thank you for episode three. Yeah. I guess we will talk about, off this call, we'll talk about what the next book will be. But, yeah, we will return for a third iteration of Translate This! My name is Jinwoo Park.

LAURENCE

And my name's Lawrence Miall. Signing off. Keep it real, everyone.

JINWOO

Great. Have a good one.