La Honte

Annie Ernaux · 1997 CE · Narrative Non-fiction · French · Contemporary

One Sunday afternoon in June 1952 a shopkeeper in a Normandy town went for his wife in the cellar with a pruning hook, and their twelve-year-old daughter saw it. Rather than dwell on the scene, the book reconstructs the world that contained it — the Catholic girls' school and its gradations of respectability, the streets, the pilgrimage to Lourdes — as an ethnographer would a vanished tribe. Ernaux treats her memory as a document to be checked.

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