Fran Magazine: Issue #40

The Happening and Happening issue

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L’evenement

I don’t usually keep up with the Nobel Prize in Literature in the same way I don’t keep up with the Pulitzer Prize: until it’s already happened. To some degree, my job requires me to be “up on stuff” and the stuff on which I am up often gets in the way, mentally, of the otherwise esoteric and needless awards season of my other great love, books. I saw some Youtuber ranking the Booker prize short list—I can’t imagine having read all of those by now, let alone one. Maybe it’s because I’m, to borrow a phrase from marketers and production company development goons that I loathe, “genre agnostic,” but my general reading strategies are much less tied to new releases and more to whatever I feel like. This isn’t a brag, for what it’s worth. It’s just to say that I learned about Elif Batuman’s sequel to The Idiot like three weeks before it came out.

It just so happened that I was up on the Nobel this year for one of three reasons: 1) Annie Ernaux is the type of author that had been making the rounds in my general ether (Twitter) for a few months now, 2) the very funny Alex Shephard Nobel predictions essay at The New Republic¹, and 3) Annie Ernaux was set to appear at the New York Film Festival where I was also set to attend. It just so happened that the craziest week of my life (the week I saw TÁR) was also the week that Ernaux won the much-deserved Nobel in Literature.

The week after, I went to Lincoln Center go see Ernaux’s documentary that she co-directed with her son David: an amalgamation of the family’s Super 8 footage from the 1970s titled (fittingly) The Super 8 Years. It’s a low-key film: grainy, warm footage of the Ernaux-Briot (her then husband’s name) family on vacation and enjoying the French countryside. There’s home video from holidays of Ernaux’s mother who helped with the children. In the documentary, Ernaux explains that she felt the inclusion of the camera in family life was an act of violence, and that the “candid” footage was often filmed against her will. Indeed, she often looks pissed off to be filmed in the movie, though gentle when with her children. In the talkback afterwards, the moderator asked what wasn’t seen in the documentary, and Ernaux made passing mention to the fact that she’d been very involved in abortion rights movement in France. Because the camera was often, if not exclusively, wielded by her husband, and these meetings with other abortion rights activists were often all women, that aspect of Ernaux’s life goes all but unseen.