A Man's Place

A Man's Place recounts the story of a daughter coming to terms with her formative years as she writes an unflinching portrait of her father's life and death. 

“Nothing less than a minimalist revelation, a piece of writing so spare and sharp that it cuts straight to the heart with the accuracy of a surgeon's scalpel.”  -  The Los Angeles Reader

Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. 

Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France.

"Writing cannot, of course, entirely escape artifice, but the rigid control that Ms Ernaux exercises gives her portrait of an ordinary, unassuming man an air of truth (.....) It is this bleak honesty, this refusal to let herself off the hook of guilt, that gives Ms Ernaux's two books their uncommon strength. Some critics have compared her to Simone de Beauvoir, but the reasonable, balanced voice I hear echoing behind her is that of Albert Camus."  -  Miranda Seymour, The New York Times Book Review

Over the course of the book, Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously even reluctantly admires. A Man's Place is the companion book to her critically acclaimed memoir about her mother, A Woman's Story.