The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Happening by Annie Ernaux. Trans. Tanya Leslie
Gregory Howard

Annie Ernaux. Happening. Trans. Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories, 2001. 95 pp. $18.95.

In Happening Ernaux returns to the experience of her illegal abortion that she plumbed in Cleaned Out. While that book used fiction to explain and expunge, this book self-consciously returns to convey and contemplate. I say self-consciously because Ernaux has written a detailed, explicit book not only about her pregnancy and abortion, but one about remembering and writing. The book was written over the course of nine months; by beginning many sections with “Yesterday” or “Last Night” Ernaux makes explicit the construction of this narrative in time. As such emotions veer, statements are made and contradicted. “Reality” in one section connotes the everyday world from which Ernaux in her condition has been exiled, and is the stark physicality and emotional landscape of that same condition in another. After seeing a documentary on Nazi death camps she thinks, “the pain I was about to inflict on myself would be nothing compared to the suffering experienced in death camps,” yet goes on to describe delivery as “D-day.” Such contradictions not only convey the emotional complexities of the ordeal, but also prove successful her desire to “revisit every single image until I feel that I have physically bonded with it.” Written words are not revisited because it would obfuscate the truth of the experience—writing bred of memory and sensation. At times her approach proves frustrating. Some sections are written a bit clumsily for a writer of Ernaux’s skill, some statements clichéd for someone of her intelligence. However, these problems are subordinated to the honesty and truth (is it not true that even great writers pen lousy sentences? And keen minds think in cliché?) Ernaux has set as her goal. Moreover, she succeeds in rendering the numbing grind of diurnal unhappiness, fearful accounts of her trips to the abortionist, and harrowing the miscarriage in her dorm room with beauty and riveting detail. [Gregory Howard]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Happening by Annie Ernaux. Trans. Tanya Leslie Gregory Howard Annie Ernaux. Happening. Trans. Tanya Leslie. Seven Stories, 2001. 95 pp. $18.95. In Happening Ernaux returns to the experience of her illegal abortion that she plumbed in Cleaned Out. While that book used fiction to explain and expunge, this book self-consciously returns to convey and contemplate. I say self-consciously because Ernaux has written a detailed, explicit book not only about her pregnancy and abortion, but one about remembering and writing. The book was written over the course of nine months; by beginning many sections with “Yesterday” or “Last Night” Ernaux makes explicit the construction of this narrative in time. As such emotions veer, statements are made and contradicted. “Reality” in one section connotes the everyday world from which Ernaux in her condition has been exiled, and is the stark physicality and emotional landscape of that same condition in another. After seeing a documentary on Nazi death camps she thinks, “the pain I was about to inflict on myself would be nothing compared to the suffering experienced in death camps,” yet goes on to describe delivery as “D-day.” Such contradictions not only convey the emotional complexities of the ordeal, but also prove successful her desire to “revisit every single image until I feel that I have physically bonded with it.” Written words are not revisited because it would obfuscate the truth of the experience—writing bred of memory and sensation. At times her approach proves frustrating. Some sections are written a bit clumsily for a writer of Ernaux’s skill, some statements clichéd for someone of her intelligence. However, these problems are subordinated to the honesty and truth (is it not true that even great writers pen lousy sentences? And keen minds think in cliché?) Ernaux has set as her goal. Moreover, she succeeds in rendering the numbing grind of diurnal unhappiness, fearful accounts of her trips to the abortionist, and harrowing the miscarriage in her dorm room with beauty and riveting detail. [Gregory Howard]

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