Exteriors

Author: Annie Ernaux

Translator: Tanya Leslie

Publisher: Seven Stories Press (2021)

Taking the form of random journal entries over the course of seven years, Exteriors concentrates on the ephemeral encounters that take place just on the periphery of a person’s lived environment. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive. Exteriors is in many ways the most ecstatic of Ernaux’s books—the first in which she appears largely free of the haunting personal relationships she has written about so powerfully elsewhere, and the first in which she is able to leave the past behind her.

“A strange but lovely collection of Ernaux’s observances in diary-like entries spanning 1985 to 1992 of people she noticed and overheard conversations on the metro and RER train, in shopping centers and parking lots. It’s kind of incredible how much insight these manage to pack in and how revealing they are of everyday lives, emotions, and events, and her writing is lyrical and poignant and I thought more accessible than some of her other work.”

–What's Non-Fiction?