CHRONICLE – “I allowed myself brutal retorts which I do not know if they were linked to his economic dependence or to his young age.” In turn, he tells everything in Bad student.
This is called being caught in your own trap. This is the curse of intimate literature: the stories sometimes respond to each other, as Springora responded to Matzneff. Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize for Literature the year the book was published. Young man (2022), which recounted his affair with a student thirty years younger. She was fifty-four, he was twenty-five, fewer than the number of pages in the book (thirty-seven). The love lasted three years: 1994-1997.
In her Nobel acceptance speech, the committed novelist declared that she wanted “avenge one’s race” et “avenge one’s sex”. Autofiction is a risky exercise: Philippe Vilain, too, avenges his youth. We read this story like an issue of Here is. The future Nobel and the broke kid travel to Italy, Spain, Russia. The reader looks at this couple through the keyhole but is it literature? Ernaux did not hide, in The Young Man, his enjoyment of…
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