Like those old friends whom we haven’t seen for years and, all of a sudden, they tell us details – lavish or laughable – of their love life that we couldn’t even suspect, so it is with Annie Ernaux’s latest book, L ‘young man’ (Angle/Cabaret Voltaire), where he narrates the relationship that the last Nobel laureate in Literature had with a boy thirty years younger.
If we already had the feeling that Ernaux lives everything to be able to write it, here she confesses it herself: a student of Letters who admired her wanted to meet her, they went to dinner, he spent all he was quiet for a while out of shyness, but she invited him to her house for a drink… because she felt like writing. “I have often made love to force myself to write”, since the state of mind that occurs during orgasm makes her feel that “there is no greater pleasure than writing a book”.
The relationship took root, and the new couple submitted to the scrutiny of society: in restaurants, beaches or the streets where they walked hand in hand… Ernaux is clear: “I was with a 25-year-old man for not having in front of me, constantly, the marked face of a man of my age, that of my own aging. In front of A., mine was also younger. The men had known for a long time, I didn’t understand why I should have been deprived of it”. More: “Our relationship could be seen from the angle of profit. He gave me pleasure and made me relive what I never imagined I could relive. To offer him trips, to save him from looking for a job that would have prevented him from being so available, seemed like a fair deal to me, especially since I was the one making the rules. He was in a dominant position.”
The work, very short, can be read in less than an hour and joins Pura passió (1992), that book in which he explains his obsessive idyll with a married diplomat from an Eastern country. If we were left with a bit of sadness there, this one has a happy ending: from the window of the boy’s flat, she could see the hospital building where she was treated as a young woman for the bleeding caused by her clandestine abortion. This motivated her to write one of her great works, The Event. The Ernaux method of stimulating writing is foolproof.
