Look at the Lights, My Love

Annie Ernaux, Alison L. Strayer

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English

Yale University
02 June 2023

Biography; Biography: general

Series: The Margellos World Republic of Letters

A meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux

For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature.

Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual’s role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism. Through Ernaux’s eyes, the superstore emerges as a “great human meeting place, a spectacle,” a space where we come into direct contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society.

With her relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

By: Annie Ernaux
Translated by: Alison L. Strayer
Imprint: Yale University
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 197mm, Width: 127mm,
ISBN: 9780300268218
ISBN 10: 0300268211
Series: The Margellos World Republic of Letters
Pages: 96
Publication Date: 02 June 2023
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Annie Ernaux is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the author of more than twenty books, including The Years, A Woman's Story, A Man's Place, Shame, and Simple Passion. Alison L. Strayer is an award-winning writer and translator.

Reviews for Look at the Lights, My Love

“The subject at the heart of Look at the Lights, My Love is what we reveal of ourselves in the strange sterility of the store. . . . Its entries are surreal, detached but supremely human.”—Tess Little, Literary Review