Outlining Reality of an Epoch Yields Bold Self-Discovery

Remember that the French invented deconstructionism. This is because they have an unusually high tolerance for the minutiae of daily life (also known as the pleasures of daily life). The French, it has been said, have a symbiotic relationship between the self and things (particularly nice-looking things and things that taste good). Remember that Proust, master of the details of self-revelation, was French. In a word, he made the details interesting. The details were where he stored his memories, his history, his self.

Well, Annie Ernaux is, among other things, French. Proust aside, she stands on her own and on several stunning books, including “A Woman’s Story,� “A Man’s Place� and, most recently, “A Simple Passion,� which is the horrifying story of her obsession with a man. (If you are thinking that you might have this disease, you might want to read this book for a portrait of what you could look like in a few months.)

All of her books share a varying degree of unsentimental self-observation, and all of her books examine and play with what it means to be a writer, how writing transforms daily experience (dolls it up or strips it bare). She seems to have a fascination for the truth, like Faulkner (whose style couldn’t be more different) about whether we can really know one another. She writes with one eye on the community and one eye on the parameters of her own life. This, as you know, can make a woman look like a Picasso painting.

Not Ernaux. She looks, from her photographs, like a modern woman who spends most of her time in the city but some time on a Montana ranch. She is very pretty but looks as though that has been no consolation to her whatsoever.

In this book of fragments and observations made from 1985 to 1992, many of them during the subway ride from her home 40 kilometers outside Paris into the city, or in the supermarket, Fanprix, Ernaux claims to be trying to “convey the reality of an epoch,� located in “the contents of our shopping cart . . . the violence and shame inherent in society can be found in the contempt a customer shows for a cashier.�

Indeed, the background for her snapshots is a glassy, mall-covered modern city, in which hardly anything stands out from urban habit, much less the subtleties of personalities and political realities revealed in passing conversations.

Ernaux was inspired in this project by her mother, who has Alzheimer’s, “no longer recognized the people around her. This annihilation of her personality,� writes Ernaux, “threw me into a state of utter confusion.� And while I would like to say that Ernaux’s observations have an unblinking quality (because I think she would like that), I can’t. She blinks, she interprets, she puts the fragments, unavoidably, into her own context, uses them to puzzle through herself. “I have this need to record scenes glimpsed . . . and people’s words and gestures simply for their own sake, without any ulterior motive.�

Well, there’s always an ulterior motive, as I think Ernaux discovers in writing “Exteriors.� “So it is outside my own life,� she confesses in the book’s last paragraph, “that my past existence lies: in passengers commuting on the subway . . . in shoppers glimpsed on escalators . . . in complete strangers who cannot know that they possess part of my story.� In her effort to make the personal political, to put her finger on the pulse of the epoch, Ernaux stumbles upon her own history. It’s all in the details.