I’ refers to oneself, the reader, and it is inconceivable, or unthinkable, for me to read my own horoscope and behave like some mushy schoolgirl. Denise, a 20-year-old college student who has just had a back-alley abortion, lies alone in her dorm room and ponders her rejection of her well-meaning parents. Interesting observations from 1985 till 1992 that still capture a lot of relevant themes of the current day. It's easy for daily commuting and its related experiences to become boringly repetitive and uninteresting.

A partir de textos curtos, num registo algo diarístico, Ernaux apresenta-no o quotidiano do subúrbio de Paris onde vive faz mais de trinta anos. I felt I was riding towards the sun; it was setting beyond the criss-cross lines of pylons hurtling towards the centre of the New Town. On the train going to Saint-Lazare, an old woman settles in a seat near the aisle; she is talking to a young boy – possibly her grandson – who is still standing: ‘Why are you so restless?What mesmerizes here, as elsewhere in Ernaux’s oeuvre, is the interplay between the solipsistic intensity of the material and its documentary, disinterested, almost egoless presentation. As per I find Ernaux sometimes illuminating, but mostly less than impressive and at times, pretentious. Nobody thinks in novel form, so as nice as it is, it’s not a realistic reproduction of the thought process. Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school.

She talks about how, in New York, she saw Paul Strand’s photographs and was blown away by the fact that the subjects were “simply there,” and considered that to be “the ideal vision of writing; inaccessible. Ernaux captures the feeling of contemporary living on the outskirts of Paris: poignantly lyrical, chaotic, and strangely alive. As a matter of fact, a lot of the entries in Exteriors read like poems, mostly due to their varying lengths and the fact that there’s this subtle, understatedness to them, which can be taken at face-value or reread and mined for universal truths. Ha együtt utaztunk volna, álltunk volna sorba a hentesnél, biztosan mást vittünk volna haza élményként.

Tanya Leslie was the first translator of Annie Ernaux into English and translated a number of her works, including A Woman’s Story (1991), A Man’s Place (1992), Simple Passion (1993), Shame (1998), I Remain in Darkness (1999) and Happening (2001). The train crawls along, as the autumn conditions in Toronto necessitate caution when navigating the open-space areas of the subway track. Ez az első - és egyetlen, azt hiszem -, ami nem Ernaux életét tárgyalja, noha tulajdonképpen ezek a benyomások is személyesek.