DO WHAT THEY SAY OR ELSE, 2022's Nobel Laureate in Literature Annie Ernaux from 1977

DO WHAT THEY SAY OR ELSE
ANNIE ERNAUX (tr. Christopher Beach, Carrie Noland)
University of Nebraska Press
$17.95 tree-book or e-book editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Originally published in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by French author Annie Ernaux. Set in a small town in Normandy, France, the novel tells the story of a fifteen-year-old girl named Anne, who lives with her working-class parents. The story, which takes place during the summer and fall of Anne’s transition from middle school to high school, is narrated in a stream-of-consciousness style from her point of view. Ernaux captures Anne’s adolescent voice, through which she expresses her keen observations in a highly colloquial style.

As the novel progresses, and Anne’s feelings about her parents, her education, and her sexual encounters evolve, she grows into a more mature but also more conflicted and unhappy character, leaving behind the innocence of her middle school years. Not only must she navigate the often-confusing signals she receives from boys, but she also finds herself moving further and further away from her parents as she surpasses their educational level and worldview.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: In this early and seemingly often overlooked entry into Nobel Laureate Ernaux's œuvre, I found a lot to wonder about. I think the entirety of an author's career is often set by the earliest works, either in action or reaction. In this case, Author Ernaux never moved her focus away from her Self, her essential project becoming refining and redacting and recalibrating the instrument of her creativity as she maintained a solid lock on what she knew best.

A woman writing in a cultural space wherein a man's wife is "sa femme"..."his woman"...is going to see her sex as a defining quality. Author Ernaux's fifteen-year-old protagonist, Anne, is...bewildered. She's reading The Stranger, and thinking of how she would create her own feminine take on the subject...teenagers and fanfiction go back a long, long way, but I am really hard-pressed to see how Meursault could be portrayed as female...she's trying to interpret her male cohort's weird, contradictory actions and words, she's trying to find some context into which her parents, the eternal enemies of our self-defining selves, fit recognizably. In short, she's fifteen.

Mme Ernaux delves into this maelstrom of bewildered and beleaguered self-ness with refreshing honesty, in that she doesn't overlay an adult's re-vision of the whole horrible mishegas of being fifteen. What happens as a result...keeping in mind the author was thirty-seven when the book came out...is what I'd call a sociology of adolescent femaleness in flux. Everything, necessarily, is related to Anne's Self in this book, since the project adolescents are engaged in is defining the Self in opposition to some Other, "I AM this" requiring "therefore I am NOT that," or it loses its solidity. It's Anne's frustratingly true-to-life Self-formation that makes me want to scream at the pages. I am not an adolescent and haven't been in a good long time. I do want to restate, though, that Anne is involved in the central project of adolescence and therefore gets her space to create only as and when afforded it. My adult(ish) male impatience is directed at my memories of the emotional devastation of the project on me, as called forth whole and entire from my own adolescence.

This is how one knows Author Ernaux was wise to stick to her focus, set so early in her writing career. A journeyman effort, decades old, brings an experienced reader into a powerfully emotional state by evoking uncertainty and angst and confusion.

The translators of this edition are to be lauded for their near-invisible work. The separate phrases are impressively wrought, the cumulative effect that Author Ernaux's writing is famous for is never out of their view:

Céline is going out with a guy from our high school, a junior. He's waiting to meet her at four o'clock on the corner next to the post office. At least it's clear what her secret is. If I was her I wouldn't even hide it. But the person who I am has no shape. Just thinking about it makes me feel heavy, like a real fatso. I'd like to sleep until a time when I could understand myself better—maybe when I'm eighteen or twenty-one. There must come a day when everything is clear, when everything falls into place.

The act of self-definition's agonies are limpidly clear. The course Anne will take is set. The problems are already present and the solutions are, to her, as yet unknowable. By the end of this under-150-page story, she's not clear but she knows clarity exists:

I have nothing to say about the topic the teacher gave us, just disordered thoughts. If I let myself go, I'd write about whatever I wanted, I would write about blood and cries, and there would be a red dress too, and jeans. People don't suspect the importance of clothes in what happens to us. And there would be meals in the kitchen. My father would say something he had heard somewhere, and my mother would stretch out a tired leg. I would write about anything, as long as it made a tight knot around me.

That evergreen of young life, the "come-here-go-away" approach avoidance dance! It's never more than that, though. This is an early work, and as such lacks some of the whole-brain fineness of resolution that would, eg I Remain in Darkness (an account of her mother's descent into Alzheimer's), Getting Lost (the diary of a passionate love affair she had with a married man), characterize the more recent work from her pen. None of it is ever less than personal. None of it is ever less than brutal, honestly, in it effects on the unsuspecting. But it all became more deft, less observational and intellectual, as her métier became her mind.

Starting here, with a teenaged girl's life still inchoate but sensed and sought within her mind and life, will ground you in the enormous pleasures to come. I think anyone who reads an Ernaux story and doesn't want more is simply and sadly missing out.