{"id":70191,"date":"2021-05-04T00:27:18","date_gmt":"2021-05-04T04:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/?p=70191"},"modified":"2021-05-04T01:08:54","modified_gmt":"2021-05-04T05:08:54","slug":"i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-17","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thebookbeat.com\/backroom\/2021\/05\/04\/i-arrogantly-recommend-by-tom-bowden-17\/","title":{"rendered":"i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A Man\u2019s Place<\/a><\/strong>
\nAnnie Ernaux (Tanya Leslie, trans.)
\nSeven Stories Press<\/p>\n

A memoir, biography, and homage to her father, Ernaux explores her upbringing in rural France by a man\u2014the main motivating force of the family\u2014who rose from poverty to the American equivalent of lower-middle class stability.<\/p>\n

Without romanticizing any of his past, Ernaux describes her father\u2019s birth into the French equivalent of sharecroppers: Workers of other peoples\u2019 land for poverty wages and little respect. Her father, she points out, was pulled out of school just days short of obtaining his elementary school certification. The family\u2019s reason was based on necessity: Now that he was 12, the landowners would not allow him to sleep in the house or feed him without pay. Ernaux\u2019s grandfather could not afford his son\u2019s room and board, and so it was off to the barn loft with him, with nothing but hard life ahead.<\/p>\n

Ernaux implies that she was on the outs with her father during her teen years, as she grew closer to her mother and he grew impatient with her teenage behavior. Typical of Ernaux\u2019s essays is an attempt to look as issues with eyes as cold as possible\u2014a French Didion, though of a different temperament and outlook. As a result, Ernaux focuses on her father\u2019s actions and their outcomes rather than the emotions they evoke; she recalls the phrases her father and mother emphasized time and again, drawing attention to how much she has internalized them in her own way of thinking and writing, even if just ironically; his commitment to modesty even when, well into middle age, he becomes the first person in his family to own property\u2014a small shop and house that he and her mother ran for many years.<\/p>\n

Despite his gruff exterior, he made sure his daughter got as much education as she qualified for, and never at his or his wife\u2019s insistence. Ernaux went to college to become a teacher, and two months after she passed her qualification exam, her father died.<\/p>\n

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