The Possession

The Possession

By Annie Ernaux, translated by Anna Moschovakis (Seven Stories Press)

Since 1974, Annie Ernaux has published more than a dozen books in France, most now available in English, each a brief, intense first-person narrative that flares up like a lighted match in the space between memoir and fiction.

Ernaux has written that she wants "to transgress all boundaries", rhetorical as well as substantive. And she does, in language she herself characterizes as "brutally direct, working-class and sometimes obscene", which takes issue with "the French tradition of the polished sentence, of 'good taste' in literature."

Ernaux's books embody a woman's life: the small-town working-class cafe and grocery run by her parents, in Normandy, in the years after World War II; an icy marriage; a back-alley abortion; the death of her parents; and so on. Although sometimes bearing a different name, the same voice seems to speak in each of these texts, as though they were successive chapters in one novel. And whatever the immediate plot, Ernaux braids into every story the story of writing it. Her major preoccupations remain language and the body.