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the complete review - memoir

Happening

by
Annie Ernaux

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : stark, well-presented personal story

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Exquisitely brief, there is nothing rushed about this book. Ernaux is working through the most personal of painful realisations: the undesired metamorphosis of her own body and what she is permitted to do with it. (...) Universal, primeval and courageous, Happening is a fiercely dislocating, profoundly relevant work -- as much of art as of human experience. It should be compulsory reading." - Catherine Taylor, Financial Times
  
  
• "Ernaux’s work is important. Not just because of her subject matter, but because of the way she hands it over: the subtle contradictions; her dispassionate stoicism, mixed with savagery; her detailed telling, mixed with spare, fragmented text." - Niamh Donnelly, Irish Times
  
  
• "Sa propre histoire, recréée à travers la prose, est offerte en partage, comme un document qui transcenderait l'individualité à force d'intimes précisions. (...) Parce qu'attention, il faut savoir que l'Evénement contient quelque chose d'absolument extraordinaire, qui ne peut se produire qu'avec la méthode d'Annie Ernaux." - Libération
  
  
• "In Happening, Ernaux marches her army toward memory, the memory of an abortion she had in 1963." - Susan Salter Reynolds, The LA Times
  
  
• "As subject matter goes, little could be more inherently provocative. Ernaux's take is all the more so for being unabashedly philosophical rather than moral." - Emily Eakins, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Ernaux (...) writes with clear, controlled precision that is as vivid as it is devastating to read, and which connects the pain and indignity of her experience to class, power and patriarchy." - Arifa Akbar, The Observer
  
  
• "This is a more conventional autobiography, being a personal story about an abortion the author had as a young woman. But it foreshadows The Years in several ways, not least in its final epiphany that an experience which was once confined to the margins -- regarded as private and shameful -- might become, through writing, legible and even liberating." - Kate Webb, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Ernaux connects her experience to the wider world of class and religion and law, resulting in a startling, unusual portrait of how a vagina really lives in the world." - Joy Press, The Village Voice

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Happening is yet another retelling of a piece of Annie Ernaux's past -- a not entirely unfamiliar one at that, as she describes her abortion when she was a student (the subject of her earlier novel, Cleaned Out (see our review)) It goes beyond merely introspective fiction, but it is not a straightforward memoir either: Ernaux has made an art of the remembering and picking apart of her life. Happening is also a specifically literary examination of this episode from her life.
       The book begins with a contemporary scene, with Ernaux again seeking out medical attention regarding an issue arising from engaging in sex: she is worried that she may have been infected with the AIDS-virus. From there she turns back to 1963-4, when she was a university student in Rouen and got pregnant. At that time in France abortion was still illegal and arranging one a complicated and dangerous undertaking. Ernaux describes the entire episode -- from discovering she is pregnant to the time after the abortion -- calmly recounting the facts and details, as well her own state of mind throughout (and the lingering emotional toll of the episode).
       From the beginning there is no question for Ernaux about keeping the child. She writes about the foetus: "It became a shapeless entity growing inside me which had to be destroyed at all costs." Getting rid of it isn't easy in the France of that time, and Ernaux has little idea of how to go about it. She tries to enlist help and solicit advice, but few people are able to be particularly helpful. Eventually she is successful, and she describes the disconcerting procedure and the aftereffects.
       It is a difficult, emotional subject. It is difficult to write about: "This thing had no place in language", she admits. It is also something she feels compelled to record, even so long (nearly four decades) after the fact, going so far as to state about writing this account:

(...) if I failed to go through with this undertaking I would be guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by male supremacy.

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Links:

• Seven Stories publicity page
• Fitzcarraldo Editions publicity page
• Folio publicity page

• Books and Bao
• Dublin Review of Books
• Ecrits ... vains ? (French)
• 1streading's Blog
• Irish Times
• Lunch Ticket
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Observer
• Pendora Magazine
• Publishers Weekly
• review 31
• The Second Pass
• The Village Voice

• The complete review's Annie Ernaux page
• Annie Ernaux site
• Nobel Prize in Literature, 2022

• Ce qu'ils disent ou rien
• Cleaned Out
• L'ecriture comme un couteau
• A Frozen Woman
• Getting Lost
• A Girl's Story
• "I Remain in Darkness"
• Look at the Lights, My Love
• A Man's Place
• The Possession
• Shame
• Simple Passion
• Things Seen
• The Years

• See also the Index of French literature at the complete review
• See Index of Books by Nobel laureates under review

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About the Author:

       French author Annie Ernaux was born in Normandy in 1940. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022.

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