A Nobel Laureate Walks Into a Supermarket

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When the French author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize last fall, it was for her highly personal books—autobiographical narratives in which she places herself on an operating table and also acts as the surgeon, splaying out her thoughts and anxieties and desires in meticulous, vulnerable detail. But little did the English-reading public know that she was also interested in … supermarkets.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s book section:

• Imagine Susan Sontag on Twitter.
• Franklin Foer on Freud’s attempt to psychoanalyze an American president
• The trees don’t care about us.
• A Q&A with Cynthia Ozick (and a new short story from her)

I saw Annie Ernaux in New York City in the days after her Nobel win. She had been scheduled to speak at a French bookstore on the Upper East Side; the organizers told me that only a few dozen people had signed up for the event before the prize was announced. When I got there, the line was around the corner. Ernaux looked a little stunned all evening. But her total self-possession was also evident. This is an author whose bravery extends to occasionally publishing what are actually just her diaries. She wrote what we now call “autofiction” before it was a thing. On the subway ride home, I started and finished L’Événement (“Happening”), the story of an illegal abortion she had in the early 1960s—the specifics are unbearable, but she does not flinch. “Every time I write, I feel like there has been no book like this before,” she told that audience last October. And listening to her, you could believe it.

This originality certainly applies to Look at the Lights, My Love, her most recent book to be translated into English, out last month (it was published in French in 2014). J. Howard Rosier wrote about it for us this week. Ernaux here turns outward, scrutinizing the seemingly trivial big-box store—specifically her local Auchan, a combined supermarket and department store—and recording each of her visits over the course of nearly a year. It’s a work of homespun sociology that, as Rosier puts it, becomes an “indictment of modern consumerism and the way it robs the individual of their autonomy.” The big-box store, Ernaux observes, boxes you in: You just want to pick up some cheese or some cereal, but it stratifies you by class, reduces you to the items on your shopping list, robs you of freedom.

At first glance, it seems an unusual book for Ernaux—for one thing, unlike in so much of her work, there’s no sex, not that heightened “intimacy” that the novelist Nellie Herman described in an essay for us about her year of obsessive Ernaux reading. But as in everything she writes, Ernaux is using herself as a test case for examining larger societal forces, making herself totally open in the process. Here, the openness is about how it feels for her and others to push a cart down a brightly lit aisle of cured meat, aware of what you can or can’t afford to buy, of what sits in other people’s carts. That same rawness and receptivity is always there.

The Indignity of Grocery Shopping

What to Read

A House for Mr. Biswas, by V. S. Naipaul

This epic novel by Naipaul, a Nobel laureate, revolves around one man’s lifelong search for a house to call his own. Mohun Biswas, born to a Hindu Indian family in 20th-century Trinidad, grows up relocating from one relative’s place to another. After marrying a woman he never intended to propose to, he moves into a large, communal fortress owned by his new, overbearing in-laws. The book’s pages are packed with contentious family drama, but the objects he and his wife accumulate—the “hatrack with the futile glass and broken hooks” and their beloved wooden safe that “had been awkward to varnish”—are treated lovingly, despite their flaws. The irony continues even after Mr. Biswas accomplishes his dream of owning a house, which has been on his mind since the very beginning of the book; Naipaul writes that the builder “seemed to have forgotten the need for a staircase to link both floors, and what he had provided had the appearance of an afterthought.” But the same tenderness applies to the house as to Mr. Biswas’s furniture: His house is not perfect, but it’s at least his.  — Yurina Yoshikawa

From our list: Seven books about how homes shape our lives

Out This Week

???? August Blue, by Deborah Levy

???? Countries of Origin, by Javier Fuentes

???? Say Anarcha: A Young Woman, a Devious Surgeon, and the Harrowing Birth of Modern Women’s Health, by J. C. Hallman

Your Weekend Read

The Defining Emotion of Modern Life

During the pandemic, New York lost infinitely more than usual: businesses, yes, beloved mainstays of city life, but also so many people. Loss was omnipresent. You could sense it in the sounds of the city: Ambulance sirens were such a regular feature that the mockingbirds in my old neighborhood started imitating their whine. Almost as unnerving was the huge number of people who simply disappeared overnight—a Rapture-like event that affected everyone with access to houses upstate. Straub didn’t think she was writing a pandemic novel. But when she held the finished book in her hands, she could see more clearly what her subconscious had been doing. This Time Tomorrow is a document of the different textures of our common grief.

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