Although Ernaux News Today

“The Young Man” is more than the story of an affair. It’s an intense re-examination of the past.

What more can be said about Annie Ernaux, novelist, memoirist, leftist, reluctant member of the French literary elite? Since she won the Nobel Prize in literature in October 2022, she’s been fêted and interviewed, profiled and praised. Best known for her short, spare memoirs, she has been credited with reinventing the genre. While many other memoirists may work like stenographers, describing life in exhaustive detail, Ernaux, the critic Alexandra Schwartz has observed, “is mor...