Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize for Literature, is delighted that her French colleague Michel Houellebecq did not have it in his place, given his ideas “totally reactionary and anti-feminist“, in a interview at Parisian dated Friday, December 9. “Even if it means having an audience with this award, given his deleterious ideas, frankly, it better be me!“, she adds, on the eve of going to receive her prestigious award in Sweden.
“I really liked his first book. Extension of the field of struggle (…) It was really new, this idea that the fight was going to be played on physical appearance. But then… I stopped reading it because of its image of women, of mothers, of mature women, its way of describing skins, sagging breasts“, she continued. “I read his Goncourt, The Map and the territory, but writing… There is none. So it’s very translated, because it’s extremely easy to translate“, she added.
First French woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature
Crowned for “courage and clinical acumen“of her largely autobiographical work, 82-year-old Annie Ernaux is the first French woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.”The Nobel is a great investment, an exit from your usual life”, she underlines in the daily newspaper. “I suspected it, that’s why I didn’t want to have it!“, she laughs, notes the journalist who interviewed her. “But what touches me is that my prize was enthusiastically welcomed by many people, women in particular.“
This award was not unanimous in France, especially among male critics and writers. “Annie Ernaux, Nobel Prize for Literature: what if it sucked“, headlined the critic Nicolas Ungemuth in Le Figaro. After the announcement of the price, Le Figaro republished a 2016 column by Frédéric Beigbeder which was ironic about the themes of his works: “in half a century, Annie Ernaux has successively written about her father, her mother, her lover, her abortion, her mother’s illness, her bereavement, her hypermarket (…) on her failed deflowering during the summer of 1958, summer camp (…) The event is told fifty years later with incredible seriousness“.