Ernaux: It's Not Fiction

In France, Annie Ernaux's collected works have been published under the title "Writing Life." Ernaux, best known among English-speakers for her book "A Simple Passion," is one of the very best chroniclers out there, taking for her sole subject a sort of unembarrassed anthropology of the self. She has often pointed out that what she writes should not be misconstrued as any sort of fiction or even storytelling. To do so is to deny the novelty and rigor of her art, the way in which, in her short books, she deploys a lean but ingenious structure and style to make simple recountings of personal facts and observations sing. Yet publishers and reviewers on this side of the pond,incapable as they are of accepting the fact that fact can be artful, or lacking a labeled category into which to slot such work, insist on classifying her book as novels or novellas. (Even the usually more enlightened but fiction-loving M.A. Orthofer over at The Complete Review does so.)