MAPATHA

                A Man's place by Annie Ernaux

“It’s the work of a novelist to tell the truth. Sometimes I don’t know what truth I’m looking for, but it’s always a truth that I’m seeking.”

                                                                   -  Annie Ernaux

         

 

                                                                      

                                                                                  

My grandfather lived in a small house with beaten earth and a thatched roof in a remote village throughout his life ...   My father had two kilometres to go on foot to get to school ...   At school, the teacher checked nails, teeth, and hair (for lice) and would rap the boys' fingers with an iron ruler if anything went wrong ... During theng the harvest season, my father had to work in the fields of wealthy farmers, so he missed school...   At one of the village festivals, he climbed up to the top of the grease pole but slipped down just before unhooking the basket of provisions... His father, seeing his failure, flew into a rage and cried at him, "Clumsy oaf." for hours .... Preparing for a wedding ceremony in this village was done for months, and the invitees to the occasion would go on starving without eating for several days to enjoy the feast at the most ....   On such a wedding day, one village woman went lavishly on to feed chicken to a child recovering from scarlet fever, and the child died choking ...  My grandfather, having no land to himself, had to work as a carter for a wealthy farmer, and being illiterate, he flew into a rage whenever he caught someone reading a book or paper in his house ... Since his father, like the other fathers in the village, was unwilling to feed the grown-ups, he left school to be a labourer in a factory rather than toiling in the fields ....   He had fallen in love with a girl, and his sisters, who used to be housemaids for middle-class houses, disliked his fiancee for wearing short dresses, having short hair, painting her nails, and most of all for being a factory girl ... After marriage, he left the village ambitiously to have a cafe on his own plot of land ....

When reading the novel, I felt that I had been planted in ideal soil to grow up in a village in France, and later in life, I was writing my life story.

That was the era of Marcel Proust's writing novels in France, though many poverty-stricken people who could not write even their names were in villages.

Anni Ernaux, the 2022 Nobel Laureate in Literature, tells the story of her father, who could not overcome many hindrances in his endeavour to rise from the lower working class to the middle class.

Her father opened his dream cafe with his wife and worked hard to develop it, but, in nature, in his leisure, he loved to do manual work , rebuilding unwanted extensions to the house and keeping a vegetable garden in the back yard.

He read papers from the first page to the last, but failed to spell "read and approved" on a visit to the solicitor , so, after a short while, he wrote "read and a proved" on the given document. Although his conversations with customers were soft and polite, he shifted to his ancestral dialect at home and shouted at the top of his voice.

In photographs, he never smiled, nor even in his wedding photo, and he never considered the settings, so in some, there were toilets or warehouses in the background.

He suffered from an inferior complex all his lifetime, haunted by his working-class origins, and passed away with many unfulfilled needs.

          It is a well-received novel with a simple but inspiring scope to illustrate the class struggle within French society through the fascinating overview of Annie Ernaux's complex relationship with her father.