Second paragraph of third section:
| Les deux grandes villes de par chez nous, Le Havre et Rouen, suscitent moins d’appréhension, elles font partie du langage de toute mémoire familiale, de l’ordinaire de la conversation. Beaucoup d’ouvriers y travaillent, partant le matin et revenant le soir par « la micheline ». À Rouen, plus proche et plus importante que Le Havre, il y a tout, c’est-à-dire des grands magasins, des spécialistes de toutes les maladies, plusieurs cinémas, une piscine couverte pour apprendre à nager, la foire Saint-Romain qui dure un mois en novembre, des tramways, des salons de thé et des grands hôpitaux où l’on emmène les gens pour les opérations délicates, les cures de désintoxication et les électrochocs. À moins d’y travailler comme ouvrier sur un chantier de reconstruction, personne ne s’y rend vêtu en « tous-les-jours ». Ma mère m’y emmène une fois par an, pour la visite à l’oculiste et l’achat des lunettes. Elle en profite pour acheter des produits de beauté et des articles « qu’on’ ne trouve pas à Y. ». On n’y est pas vraiment chez nous, parce qu’on ne connaît personne. Les gens paraissent s’habiller et parler mieux. À Rouen, on se sent vaguement « en retard », sur la modernité, l’intelligence, l’aisance générale de gestes et de paroles. Rouen est pour moi l’une des figures de l’avenir, comme le sont les romans-feuilletons et les journaux de mode. | The two big cities from around these parts, Le Havre and Rouen, arouse less suspicion; they are inscribed in the linguistic memory of all families and belong to ordinary conversation. Many factory hands work there, leaving in the morning and coming back in the evening on the micheline, a small local train. In Rouen, the larger city, closer to us than Le Havre, they’ve got everything you need – department stores, specialists for every type of complaint, several cinemas, an indoor pool for learning how to swim, the Saint-Romain festival lasting the month of November, tramways, tea rooms and huge hospitals where people are taken for major operations, detoxification programmes and electroshock treatment. Unless you happen to be a labourer working on a building site, you would never go there in your ‘everyday’ clothes. My mother takes me there once a year to visit the eye specialist and buy me a pair of glasses. She takes advantage of the trip to purchase beauty products and other articles ‘you can’t get in Y’. We never feel quite at home there because we don’t know anyone. People appear to dress and speak better than in the country. In Rouen, one always feels slightly ‘at a disadvantage’ – less sophisticated, less intelligent and, generally speaking, less gracious in one’s body and speech. For me, Rouen symbolizes the future, just like serialized novels and fashion magazines do. |
Out of curiosity, because Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, I went to Filigranes near my office and got hold of this – I think because it was the cheapest on the shelf of English translations of her work. It’s a very intense story of a teenager in provincial Normandy in 1952 and the poisonous relationship between her parents – the very first sentence is “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” The environment is dominated by social inequality and unthinking piety, not a million miles or a million years from the Catholic Belfast where I grew up. Clearly autobiographical, and I understand it’s rooted in Ernaux’s bigger project of re-examining her entire life in fictional form. But I suspect this is a good taster, at only 85 pages. You can get it here (and here in French).
