A Man's Place
"May I venture an explanation: writing is the ultimate recourse for those who have betrayed," says Jean Genet in the epigraph to Ernaux's "autobiographical narrative" about her relationship with her father. The betrayer is Ernaux herself, a cultivated intellectual whose bitter resentment towards her petit bourgeois parents first appeared in her novel Cleaned Out . The betrayed, of course, are her parents, without whose efforts the disparity in stations would not have existed. Although not as painfully immediate as Ernaux's depiction of her mother in A Woman's Story , this is nonetheless an affecting portrait of a man whose own peasant upbringing typified the adage that a child should never be better educated than his parents. Ernaux uses, as she says, "no lyrical reminiscences, no triumphant displays of irony," but rather a dispassionate narrative to describe her father's climb to the relative prosperity of a shopkeeper in a small Norman town, and his fretful vigilance lest his manners, language, posture--or daughter--betray his uneasy social position.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.