Exteriors

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Glimpses" would have been an equally worthy name, and perhaps a more truthful one as these individuals' "exteriors" often do tell us more about them, and — as the author noted above — us, than the word "exteriors" may suggest. This is a completely different mode of writing than anything else I’ve read by her and is additive to her autofictive depiction across her oeuvre, perhaps essential.

Because Ernaux has written about her mother ( A Woman's Story ), her father ( A Man's Place ) and herself ( Cleaned Out ), one can almost hear an anxious tremor in the narrator's (Ernaux's?

Izgalmas, mert úgy mesél Annie Ernauxról, hogy azt a világ apró rebbenései és a krónikás ezekről alkotott benyomásai mögé rejti, azaz egyáltalán nem személytelen. On the train going to Saint-Lazare, an old woman settles in a seat near the aisle; she is talking to a young boy – possibly her grandson – who is still standing: ‘Why are you so restless? 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.

Both laws rely on the same misconception of reality, the only reference being oneself: in the first case, we imagine everyone else has lived our life, while in the second, we long to recapture our past identity through people who are frozen in time, whose features are the same as when we last saw them. She talks about how, in New York, she saw Paul Strand’s photographs and was blown away by the fact that the subjects were “simply there,” and considered that to be “the ideal vision of writing; inaccessible. Szerettem, mert más mint az autofikciói, és egy olyan életbe enged betekintést, amiről én a nyolcvanas években nem is álmodhattam. Her autobiographical novels like Cleaned Out, A Woman's Story, A Man's Place and Simple Passion succeeded brilliantly because Ernaux is mordantly critical of every character--especially her own.

I say that it’s about feeling overwhelmed because, in the preface, Ernaux describes how living in “a place bereft of memories, where the buildings are scattered over a huge area, a place with undefined boundaries, proved to be an overwhelming experience.