Lo que ellos dicen o nada

by Annie Ernaux, Lydia Vázquez Jiménez (translator)

Anne es una adolescente que, como las demás, intenta comunicarse y comprender el mundo que la rodea. Pero es en vano, porque ni las palabras de sus padres, ni las de Mathieu ―el estudiante al que conoce durante las vacaciones de verano―, ni tan siquiera las bellas y arrebatadas palabras de los libros que lee parecen reflejar la realidad que ella vive, y cada vez se siente más sola.
«Para qué quiero que me venga la regla. Mi tía dijo se te ha comido la lengua el gato, Anne, antes eras más habladora. Es más bien su lengua la que ya no hablo. Todo en mí es como un caos, no pega nada con lo que ellos dicen.»

Genres: France, Fiction, Nobel Prize, French Literature, Womens, Contemporary, Literary Fiction

116 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

The author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, Annie Ernaux is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place.

Reviews

[Elyse Walters · Rating 4 out of 5]

Given that Annie Ernaux, is the recent winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature —
and I had loved her book “The Years” ….
I have the desire to read all her books (we’ll see how that works out in time)…
but for now - I picked
“Do What They Say or Else”….
which was originally published in 1977– Annie Ernaux’s second novel.

The setting is in Normandy, France during the summer and fall during a time when
the protagonist, Anne, fifteen years old, is transitioning between middle school and high school.

As a coming-of-age story … it’s as raw an intimate as as any story can be.
We live inside the head of Anne: her inquisitiveness…self doubt, anger, desires, and confusion.

Anne is a bright young adolescent with strong and conflicting feelings about her purpose in life. She has alternating strong and questioning opinions about school, her parents, her body, boys, friends, and sex.
It often felt as if Anne was negotiating—‘something’ …
She had the belief at a young age — that we can’t have everything we want in life.
So life was a trade off of either or…..
“What would I rather have, good grades or a good body? It would be too much to ask for both. We can’t expect to get everything in life. If your body develops too quickly, it must be a drain on the intelligent”.

“I had tears in my eyes. That happens to me now whenever I see bad things happening. You have the feeling that it’s just bad luck, and that you can’t do anything to change it”.

“It was difficult for me to imagine real freedom when I didn’t even know what it looked like. I thought about love, about the oat field that was very far from my parents, with thoughts of school hardly existing anymore. Yes, I finally understood. You could make love: it’s unhealthy to be a virgin. I liked to listen to Mathieu. It was the most beautiful two weeks of summer vacation in my whole life—even when I wasn’t going to the summer camp and was mildewing at the house—because I was asking myself questions. All these people at the supermarket, or in their cars, who didn’t know they had missed out on their lives. I felt superior to them for knowing. It was something that would only help me out later, because for the time being, as I was watching my parents smother the tender green beans they had grown in the garden with sauce— that’s one more that no one will steal from us, as my father like to say as he stretched after eating—I didn’t know how I can make them see that they were exploited and unhappy without even realizing it”.

“I watched my mother getting all worked up, ironing and smoothing out the laundry with her rough hand, always fussing around, making sure that everything was clean. What would people say about us if the curtains were to turn gray? We had to hold onto our small share of pride. I think it was at the end of August that I completely stopped loving her”.
“She’s just an ordinary woman who always has the same conversations and always uses the same words. It’s hard to think that I once adored her, or at least the kid who was me did
. How unbelievable. I remember her voice, on the days when we had big family dinners. I would go to sleep, lying against her chest, and hear the words forming there. There was a rumble, as if I was being born out of that voice. It would have been fine with me if they had all died—even my father—but not her. At the seaside, I used to faint with horror when she would lean out into the void beyond the cliffs. I thought that she was going to let herself fall just to punish me for my badness, or to show me that she didn’t need me. And she had the right to make me die if I was too naughty”.

Growing up is hard to do—
…Annie Ernaux —elegantly exposes the awkward -often embarrassing and intimidating adolescent years — girlhood issues - educational pressures, expectations with her family, peers, weighing in on feelings about security, reassurance needs vs. independence needs…..and fears of making the right choices.

Ha…. As if it gets any easier— making choices as adults?

I like Annie Ernaux’s introspective prose. She’s a good fit author for me — and I look forward to reading more of her books.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Alberto Villarreal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Este es el duodécimo libro que leo de Annie Ernaux. Se siente que es tan solo el segundo libro que ella publicó. No veo a la Ernaux que disfruto tanto, un poco porque se percibe que todavía no terminaba de construir su voz y quizá otro poco porque los temas de este libro no me parecen demasiado interesantes, exceptuado algunas páginas hacia el final del libro.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

The place you start from isn't your social condition - it's your parents

This is a translation of an old Ernaux book which was originally published in French in 1977. As such, it's the predecessor to some of her better known autofiction which treat the same topics with more depth and detail in separate narratives.

Here, topics of an adolescent's fraught relationship with her working class parents, her first experiences of sex, and her attempts to assert a sense of selfhood and growing independence are all crushed in together and don't have the same shape and significance that Ernaux gives them later.

Nevertheless, this is Ernaux and still worth reading for her cool and precise prose as she casts her eyes over issues of class and gender, social expectations and rebellions in twentieth century post-war France.

[Lucinda Garza Zamarripa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esta es el segundo libro que publicó Annie Ernaux, todavía en los setentas, todavía sin encontrar su estilo (con el que se ganó el Nobel) pero desde un inicio fiel a los temas que le seguirían obsesionando en el futuro.

Todavía experimentando con la forma es capaz de canalizar una voz adolescente de una manera impresionante, retratando un verano eterno en el que se aburre y se descubre, en el no pasa nada pero pasa todo, en el que hay antes y después pero nadie a su alrededor lo comprende. La narradora (Anne) está harta de su vida y envidia de las demás, se siente inferior y a veces superior que sus compañeras, se comienza a aventurar en el amar a los hombres pero detestar cómo la pueden tratar. Hay tanta soledad en el corazón de la narración, creo que es un gran ejemplo del angst adolescente de la segunda mitad del siglo XX, de una chica que cambia en un mundo que se transforma más rápido que ella.

Siempre es interesante ver el trabajo más temprano de una autora que ahora tiene una pluma tan definida.

(Este es mi Ernaux N° 15)

[Alan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ernaux Season. Day 11.

Reading this novel after Ernaux’s other impactful works is almost insulting. It’s an early one, I know, but even still. It was like pulling teeth - the themes from other works were apparent, just not well-developed or hard-hitting. Her non-fiction is much better.

That’s it.

[Ruben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Annie Ernaux's second novel, written in 1976 and already having all the hallmarks of her later work.

Anne is around 16, it's an endless summer holiday and her parents don't have the money to go on vacation. It is suffocating at home. Anne can't stand the narrow-mindedness of her working class parents. Her mother keeps a constant eye on Anne, who would like to go out and meet boys.

I think this is my fifth Ernaux and although it is an early one it already had everything I admire about her books: precise language, complete openness and the ability to weave a fluent narrative from a seemingly simple succession of anecdotes.

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Primera lectura del año con autora y editorial fetiche. La joven Anne, más perdida y confusa que nunca, pasa el tedioso verano: el de sus quince a los dieciséis, el cambio del colegio al instituto y el de la pérdida de la virginidad. Ya no se reconoce en sus padres, en su entorno y busca su lugar en el mundo siguiendo el despertar de sus deseos y pulsiones aunque a veces yerra. "Lo que ellos dicen o nada" es la pieza que me faltaba de sus primeros libros, entre "Los armarios vacíos" y "La mujer helada". La Nobel de 2022 no deja de sorprenderme con su capacidad de hurgar en la herida y de poner por escrito tantas sensaciones atesoradas en la memoria. Brava Ernaux.

[mel]

I have to start this one soon. Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel prize in literature. Yay! :)

[Héctor Elvira]

Siempre excelente.
Este es uno de sus primeros libros y se nota en el estilo.
En este libro nos narra (desde el punto de vista de la Annie de 15/16 años) como descubre el sexo y el socialismo. Me ha gustado especialmente porque hay veces que juega con esa ingenuidad.
Una de mis partes favoritas fue:
"«Tú es que lo quieres todo y acabas de aterrizar en este mundo.» Esa frase me puso de los nervios, estaba a punto de cumplir dieciséis años, no se daban cuenta."
A lo mejor es verdad que lo queremos todo de jóvenes, o al menos eso decía Jaime Gil de Biedma que los jóvenes venimos a llevarnos la vida por delante, pero creo que Ernaux tiene un poco de razón con 16 años no acabamos de aterrizar en el mundo, llevamos ya un tiempo conociéndolo y quizá estamos infantilizandonos un poco (creo que me incluyo a mí mismo) y tenía derecho a estar molesta con su padre.
También dice en un momento «Lloré contra la almohada para que no me oyeran mis padres, sobre todo mi padre, que tiene la manía de preguntar enseguida y de sopetón ¿qué coño te pasa?, que se podría traducir por ¿sabes que nos tocas las pelotas, y mucho, con tu manía de no ser feliz?»
Ese párrafo me dejó con la boca en el suelo.

[Svitani · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ser una chica es difícil, ser una adolescente es complicado. Pero ser una chica y, además, adolescente, es imposible. No ser vista pasa por no ser percibida que pasa por no ser escuchada y por no ser sentida. Ruedas por el suelo de vidas ajenas como un ovillo que nunca acaba de formarse y te confunden con un balón, de aquí para allá, vuelta y gol. Me hubiese encantado leerlo cuando tenía dieciocho y mi cabeza era infinita y este libro entero podría haber sido yo una noche de no poder dormir, un blablabla infinito, todo un discurso en una sesión nocturna e íntima de cuatro horas conmigo mismo. Ser chica es agotador. Ser adolescente, y además, chica, (y además, de familia obrera) es todo un rodeo de supervivencia.

[xira · Rating 3 out of 5]

una annie adolescente que descubre el sexo y la conciencia de clase, temas que tratará más y mejor en novelas posteriores. se nota que es su segunda novela, pero tiene pasajes maravillosos como siempre

[Lady Clementina ffinch-ffarowmore · Rating 3 out of 5]

My thanks to the University of Nebraska Press for a review copy of this book via Edelweiss.

Originally published in 1977, Do What They Say or Else is the second novel by Annie Ernaux, translated here by Christopher Beach and Carrie Noland. While this was the first time I read anything by her, one could clearly see this as typifying what she is known for, described on the Nobel prize site as revealing ‘with great courage and clinical acuity … the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are’, and all this in ‘plain’, ‘uncompromising’ terms.

Do What They Say or Else is narrated in the voice of fifteen-year-old Anne, who lives in Normandy with her working-class parents. We essentially follow her over the course of a long vacation after she has completed middle school and is waiting to start high school, the ultimate goal being to become a school teacher. Anne’s relationship with her family is fraught and she struggles with the disconnect and dissonance she feels with her parents, who while proud of her achievements and being the first in her family to get so far, aren’t quite on the same plane with her. She is constantly critical, even contemptuous of their little habits and ways, their inability to appreciate the things she does (The Stranger which she is reading at the time, for instance, or working-class politics) and especially what she sees as their subservience to social betters (this is, I should clarify, in her perceptions of them, not ever openly expressed). Alongside as an adolescent she is also keen (almost desperate) to explore her sexuality, sneaking off with her friends to meet boys, but on that path is much confusion and a reality that doesn’t align with expectation. We follow her over the course of that vacation and navigate through her thoughts and experiences of family, school and education, the future, and her relationships with friends and the boys she meets.

While I can’t really say I ‘liked’ the book, I very much appreciated the rawness, honesty and authenticity of the book. There are no pretences or attempts to disguise or romanticize here but a straightforward telling of her feelings and experiences, just as they are. I was also quite awestruck by the authenticity of the voice here as Ernaux manages to capture her adolescent self (including those feelings of superiority and all-knowingness) perfectly as if these were things unfolding at the time of writing rather than years earlier (Did she keep a diary?).

And yet while one can at a level sympathise with Anne and her various predicaments, and even understand that at that stage, she as an adolescent would lack the maturity to see things as one would (hopefully) later in life, she still wasn’t a person I found I could really take to.

But that said, I am still glad to have read the book, to experience her writing and style, and the various themes and issues she touched on even in the short space (120 pages in the edition I read)—from personal and relationship issues, to body image and perception, class/politics, gender/divides and much else.

3.25 stars

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

for 48 hours i was a schoolgirl in normandy

[Erik Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't know how to rate this one yet. I'm glad I read it. I don't know that I enjoyed any of it. I'm curious to read more of her work, but probably not a lot more.

[miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

nunca en mi vida he tenido un pensamiento original es perfecto

[cass krug · Rating 4 out of 5]

finally got to read ernaux’s second novel as i’m coming to the end of my stack of books by her. this one occupies and interesting space in her catalog since it’s fiction and it’s from so early on in her career.

i can see this being good for both completionists and ernaux newbies, because it is so representative of the author’s preoccupations and the themes that pop up in all her work. her later books have better writing in my opinion, but this feels like such a quintessential annie ernaux book. it’s such a quick read that if you’re interested in getting acquainted with her, i don’t think you’d be mad about picking this one up.

as far as the content, this novel is basically the fictionalized version of her memoir a girl’s story (one of my all time faves). it recounts the summer of 15 year old anne, when she first became involved with a boy. she was also dealing with the transition into high school and the realization that her education was setting her apart from her parents. this is more of a straightforward coming of age story, lacking the later-in-life self-reflection that’s in a girl’s story.

[Javi Hernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Mi tía dijo se te ha comido la lengua el gato, Anne, antes eras más habladora. Es más bien su lengua la que no hablo.”

Ernaux expone en estas páginas aquello de [toda mujer tiene a un hombre dentro, que la está constantemente mirando]

Pienso que los hombres representamos ese punto central del manifiesto antisemita de Goebbels. Repite una mentira hasta la saciedad, y acabará siendo verdad. Somos esa mentira que acaba generando culpa en aquellas que contactan con su cruda verdad.

“Para acordarme, abrí las piernas, pero me entraron ganas de llorar antes de empezar”

[Andrea (abooksplace) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me gusta de Annie que incluso cuando crees que no, al final sí. ❤️

[anahissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first Ernaux and it’s her second novel so I’m guessing it will get better so perhaps I shouldn’t rate it 5 stars in anticipation of her other works. But I am anyway because I thoroughly enjoyed this. It’s precise and flowing. Very little happens though what does happen is incredibly consequential and every anecdote however simple is fraught with feeling and anxiety, and it all feels connected to bigger themes that are hard to tackle for a 15 year old and Ernaux does a wonderful job of capturing that youth. The feeling that summers are endless, the comparisons, the dread of your life stretching out before you, of your youth wasting, the infatuation with what is kept from you (sex), and the desperation for some sort of assertion of self or independence. I feel sad and very seen. I saw myself in a way that made me uncomfortable.

[altagracia · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Lloré contra la almohada para que no me oyeran mis padres, sobre todo mi padre, que tiene la manía de preguntar enseguida y de sopetón ¿qué coño te pasa?, que se podría traducir por ¿sabes que nos tocas las pelotas, y mucho, con tu manía de no ser feliz?”
“pero si es que lo tiene todo para ser feliz, si dijeras que no nos ocupamos de ella…,”

[Roam Yocham · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I thought about God, not the God of the mass and the virgin wearing a washed-out blue dress, but the one who was dripping with sadness, the one who maybe never existed. The one who left us alone. It felt like I didn’t have parents either. Suddenly, I felt old. These kinds of thoughts make you feel older, because you’ve never had them before. It seemed to me that I could understand why people write books, better than I had when we read them in school. They write them because there are fairs full of noise, and because they suddenly come apart.”

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Annie forever.

[Covadonga Diaz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Es el primer libro de la autora que leo. Autobiográfico como toda su obra, aquí repasa su adolescencia, el cambio al instituto, el primer sexo. Impresiona el realismo algo crudo con el que describe el distanciamiento de sus padres y el sufrimiento de encontrar un sitio entre sus iguales.

[Clara F · Rating 4 out of 5]

la madre de todos los relatos de niñas de clase obrera en verano

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was alright, was waiting for a story to emerge but maybe I’m too dim to figure out what the real story was. 3.5 stars but as u know I always round up

[Mari · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tuven que volver a empezalo porque me estaba costando seguirlle o fío e teño que decir que ahora si me gustou. As ideas desordenadas representan a Annie do 76 e, coma sempre, Annie nunca defrauda 🥰

[Lucía González · Rating 3 out of 5]

it was painful to finish this. not good, read any other ernaux

[javi]

annie ernaux es una adolescente que deja de reconocerse en sus padres, en su clase social y en las cuatro paredes que la atrapan en el sopor de un verano tedioso, que no pasa. la asaltan deseos, pulsiones y rencores que no entiende porque nadie le ha dado nunca las palabras para nombrarlos. cae en su tentación y pronto conoce los peligros de los que nadie nunca le ha advertido. su madre nota la transformación en su hija y se preocupa de la única forma que sabe: vigilándola, asfixiándola. esta novela va sobre decir cosas, sobre callárselas y sobre una niña que siente que solo vale Lo que ellos dicen o nada.

[Luis Le drac · Rating 3 out of 5]

Annie Ernaux es negra. Más bien, mi negra porque escribe más que para mí, por mí. Evitemos herir sensibilidades y sustituyámoslo por el término inglés “ghost writer”, aunque también puede causar enfado en los fantasmas. ¡Mecagüen to lo que se menea! Un saludo para los fantasmas. En fin, que Annie Ernaux supone ella misma que está tecleando y contándonos su vida en esas pequeñas y delicadas joyas que son sus libros pero, como os digo, está escribiendo sobre mí. Sobre mi infancia. Lees a Annie Ernaux y te crece el egocentrismo porque todo huele a ti. Que habla de Normandía, pues es tu Normandía (aunque no hayas estado). De tu conciencia de clase, pues lo mismo. Que abortó ilegalmente en un libro magistral y, a la vez, desgarrador, pues oye, no hablará de tu aborto, pero sí del momento más doloroso de tu vida. Y lo clava. ¿Que no lo creéis? ¡Elegid arma y batámonos en duelo! O mejor. Abrid un libro por donde queráis y lo comprobaréis. Este, la capacidad de permitir escucharte, de empatizarte a ti mismo, es el principal mérito de la obra de Anne o Annie. Es que le tengo confianza porque me acabo de zampar cinco Ernaux. Y aunque estoy jugando con un estilo muy metafórico, todos me entendéis. Un saludo para los antropófagos que me estéis leyendo.

Toda la obra de Ernaux tiene como tema central la culpa, el dolor por sentirse particular, que no diferente; por sentirse propia. Y es que va de muy progre y muy de izquierdas, pero en sus textos -me cuesta hablar de novela, porque incluso las que ella denomina novelas no lo son del todo. ¿Son memorias, autoficción, diarios?- la componenda religiosa embadurna todas sus líneas. Vuelvo a la idea del pathos y su consecuencia, el dolor. Platón y la cultura judeocristiana que siempre nos impide ser felices y que empapela todo su ser. ¡Ay, Annie, siempre tropezando en ese valle de lágrimas! Que mira que es difícil que te caigas aquí; si no hay piedras… Pero yo me callo, porque aunque ella crea que está escribiendo sobre su vida, está dibujando nuestro ánimo. Que ya le gustaría a los perfiladores de Mindhunter tenerla en su equipo del FBI. Oye, que yo no sé cómo soy, pero es leer lo que ella me ha escrito y corroborar que soy yo quien está en esa página. El yo y el súper yo freudiano, pues en ernauxiano. El yo es tú y su súper tú. Dadle una vuelta a esta esquizofrenia. ¡Mecagüen la leche¡ !Ni el algoritmo de Google me conoce tan bien! Un saludo para este algoritmo que me estará leyendo ahora, sin duda, y estará diciendo qué memo eres. Y otro de los engaños en los que la francesa se hunde y que yo no quiero revelarle es que todos sus libros giran en torno a una misma etapa, su infancia. Ella cree que no, que escribe sobre sus padres, sus amoríos de madurez, sus primeros amores de juventud, la escuela… Pero es que vives en engaño absoluto, ¡leches! Esta es capaz de creer en los Reyes Magos todavía (Que si me lee algún niño, que sí, que sí existen).

Ernaux es como los perros. No, no. Que no la estoy llamando perra. ¡Madre en la que me estoy metiendo! Le he dicho de todo, que si negra (pero tachadlo), que si fantasma y ahora perra. Por favor, no llaméis a la “patrulla woke”. Es que estoy viviendo en una metáfora pura, al igual que la Nobel. Rememora un recuerdo -en realidad es mi recuerdo- y, a partir de ahí, se introspecciona para así entender por qué actúo así. Es muy valiente porque el dolor que le causa, le supura y sana. Lo malo de todo esto es que también me afecta a mí, como si fuéramos gemelos, porque Annie, “te me está escribiendo”. Y te digo más. Me describes de forma precisa, quirúrgica diría yo, porque “lo que escuece, cura” que decía mi abuela y es la única forma que tiene de cicatrizar. Pero vuelvo a lo de perro, que no quiero que se mantenga la confusión. Ernaux afirma que tiene 84 años, pero no. Ella cree escribir sobre su vida, pero el origen de su vida, del nacimiento de su conciencia, está en su infancia, que es la que le marcó y le produjo esa culpa ontológica de la que he hablado. Pero es que Ernaux no tiene 84 años, sino que es joven. A veces, incluso, todavía adolescente. Es que Ernaux es un perro o una tortuga, que también me vale porque mientras yo cumplo años a escala 1:1; ella los cumple a escala 1:7; así que está claro. Annie Ernaux tiene muy reciente su infancia y juventud porque la acaba de vivir o de sufrir y, por eso, es capaz, de analizar nuestra infancia, que es la suya, cuente lo que cuente.

Y después de todos “estos halagos”, os voy a decir uno que es ciertamente verdad. Tras haber leído nueve libros de Annie Ernaux este año, he llegado a la conclusión de que es el escritor o escritora (ella prefiere que la denominen écrivain y no écrivaine) con mayor calidad del momento. Porque es un fantasma; pero no un fantasma de los que escriben por ti, sino porque todo en ella es un velo, una aparente confusión. Todo en ella es una gasa que parece inmaterial porque deja atravesar la luz, pero es corpóreo y resistente. Parece que su sintaxis es sencilla, pues no lo es. Es cuidadosa y acurada. Que siempre habla de ella. Pues ya os he dicho que no. Que habla de mí, o de ti. Que sus temas van desde sus padres al aborto pasando por sus estudios y amoríos. Pues tampoco. No das ni una. Es su infancia, ya lo sabes. Y así con todo. Yo quiero que Annie Ernaux sea Patrimonio material e inmaterial de la Humanidad. Y si lo es ella, también lo seré yo. Es que me sale el narcisismo por todos mis poros.

Si a alguien le interesara. Los cincos libros que he leído en esta tanda son:
-Los armarios vacíos.
-La escritura como un cuchillo.
-El acontecimiento.
-La vergüenza.
-Lo que ellos dicen o nada.