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A review by kavreb
Look at the Lights, My Love by Annie Ernaux
4.0
I guess this is what happens when Ernaux runs out of diaries to adapt …
But joking aside, it's not every day that somebody makes you look differently at something you see everyday. I don't really like supermarkets all that much, they're just too big and loud and crowded (though malls are really the worst, I say, looking twice my age), but I can certainly appreciate Ernaux’s appreciation, and maybe I am being too harsh, these big and mostly clean modern creations of capitalistic overreach that work as the contemporary mingling spot, an oasis in the middle of the city, we don't talk, but we co-exist in our way to a filled tabled, cupboard, birthday party, and so on, the sign of our times. It used to be the church that overtook our lives by laying its grubby mitts on the inevitable aspects of it, birth, death, marriage, midwinter holidays; now supermarkets offer the priests worthy competition by working to lay claim to even more with their seasonal sales & an offering for every need you can’t but they can think of.
Ernaux can't help but feel hopelessly her social class, her economic class, her skin colour etc; a well-off white middle-aged (or more) literary writer slumming; but she's not cruel, and she's not that condescending, she really sees herself more a part of it, even if she's better educated than most people you meet there.
The collection of her trips to the store is certainly meandering, and one can easily joke about how she's trying to overcome writer’s block by writing about whatever happened to be in front of her and incidentally she was in a store, but her laconic observations, informed by her literary education & liberal views, while keeping her at a distances due to the inherent position of a cold observer, they draw us nearer to ourselves, moving in the supermarket corridors, heads lost in our lists and needs, occasionally stumbling into a well-placed attention grabber, buying the candy we didn't need or looking at the screaming items in our carts we didn't want, drowning through the self-service, and once out, running in liberation.
Ernaux is quite happy with the time that comes before the running, even if she is also harshly critical of the overwhelmingly capitalistic zeal of the place, the money in your pocket the most important thing, the customer far second, the employee even further behind, and the person making the things in Bangladesh not even registering at all. It’s quietly fascinating to see it through her eyes, even if I'll keep running myself.
But joking aside, it's not every day that somebody makes you look differently at something you see everyday. I don't really like supermarkets all that much, they're just too big and loud and crowded (though malls are really the worst, I say, looking twice my age), but I can certainly appreciate Ernaux’s appreciation, and maybe I am being too harsh, these big and mostly clean modern creations of capitalistic overreach that work as the contemporary mingling spot, an oasis in the middle of the city, we don't talk, but we co-exist in our way to a filled tabled, cupboard, birthday party, and so on, the sign of our times. It used to be the church that overtook our lives by laying its grubby mitts on the inevitable aspects of it, birth, death, marriage, midwinter holidays; now supermarkets offer the priests worthy competition by working to lay claim to even more with their seasonal sales & an offering for every need you can’t but they can think of.
Ernaux can't help but feel hopelessly her social class, her economic class, her skin colour etc; a well-off white middle-aged (or more) literary writer slumming; but she's not cruel, and she's not that condescending, she really sees herself more a part of it, even if she's better educated than most people you meet there.
The collection of her trips to the store is certainly meandering, and one can easily joke about how she's trying to overcome writer’s block by writing about whatever happened to be in front of her and incidentally she was in a store, but her laconic observations, informed by her literary education & liberal views, while keeping her at a distances due to the inherent position of a cold observer, they draw us nearer to ourselves, moving in the supermarket corridors, heads lost in our lists and needs, occasionally stumbling into a well-placed attention grabber, buying the candy we didn't need or looking at the screaming items in our carts we didn't want, drowning through the self-service, and once out, running in liberation.
Ernaux is quite happy with the time that comes before the running, even if she is also harshly critical of the overwhelmingly capitalistic zeal of the place, the money in your pocket the most important thing, the customer far second, the employee even further behind, and the person making the things in Bangladesh not even registering at all. It’s quietly fascinating to see it through her eyes, even if I'll keep running myself.