The Other Daughterby Annie Ernaux, the most recent title by the 2022 Nobel Prize winner, published by Livros do Brasil, in the Dois Mundos collection, is an unpublished book that arrives in Portugal with a translation by Tânia Ganho. As usual, this is an intimate statement from the author and consists of a brief narrative, lasting around 70 pages.
«When I was little, I thought – I’m sure they told me – that it was me. It’s not me, it’s you.”
Annie Ernaux begins by evoking a sepia-toned, oval photograph, pasted on a card, showing a baby perched, crosswise, on overlapping cushions, with a border.
PhD in Literature at UAlg
and Researcher at the Center for Research in Arts and Communication (CIAC)
In 2010, Annie Ernaux received an invitation from the publisher NiL to participate in the collection THE Freedbuilt on a challenge to the authors: write a letter to someone to whom one has never written. The author-narrator then decides to write a letter to her parents’ other daughter, the sister who entered her life dead, and who haunted her…
A memory recovered through writing that, by resurrecting the sister she never knew and never lived, allows the author to delve into and reconstruct her past, a past made of silences, as the parents instituted a dense silence and never spoke of this other daughter, who died. at the age of 6 with diphtheria, in the presence of her daughter.
«You are the girl who went to heaven, the invisible girl who was never talked about, the one absent from all conversations. The secret.”
The discovery took place on a Sunday in August 1950, in Yvetot, when, at the age of ten, he accidentally overheard, and in secret, a conversation between his mother and a client. From then on, a game of mirrors is created, which also reflects an identity crisis – which one is the real daughter, which one is the pale copy?
It is through writing that, as always, Ernaux tries to untangle these knots of silence and expectations – because it is difficult to overcome a perfect girl who survives only in memory.
Annie Ernaux was born in Lillebonne, Normandy, in 1940, and studied at the universities of Rouen and Bordeaux, graduating in Modern Literature. He is currently one of the most important voices in French literature, standing out for writing that merges autobiography and sociology, memory and the history of recent events. Awarded the French Language Prize (2008), the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize (2017), the Formentor de las Letras Prize (2019) and the Prince Pierre of Monaco Prize (2021) for her lifetime of work, her books stand out. A Place in the Sun (1984), winner of the Renaudot Prize, and The Years (2008), winner of the Marguerite Duras Prize and finalist for the Man Booker International Prize. Annie Ernaux was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022.
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