Look at the Lights, My Love

February 1, 2023
The 2022 Nobel laureate ruminates on a year of shopping at her local big-box retailer. "So, from November 2012 to October 2013," writes Ernaux, "I made a record of most of my visits to the Auchan superstore in Cergy, where I usually go, for reasons of convenience and pleasure." Noting the role of the arts in determining what people find worth remembering, the author laments that superstores "are only starting to be considered as places worthy of representation." Ernaux feels that conventional discourse about them is "tinged with aversion," which is not her take at all--even though, back in 1993, when she first began writing about the superstore "as a great human meeting place," she did so "with a certain sense of shame." These days, her feelings about Auchan are closer to those reflected by the book's title, a bit of overheard dialogue between a mother and child just in front of her on the moving walkway as they ascend toward "the lights and garlands hanging down like necklaces of precious stones." Ernaux mostly loves the place, though her approbation includes a cleareyed grasp of its mission, for example, as seen in the area of cultural diversity. "A few meters away, in the space set up for Ramadan, an ecstatic little boy holds a pack of dates stuffed with pink and green almond paste," she writes. "Indifferent to the xenophobic fears of one part of society, the superstore adapts to the cultural diversity of its clientele, scrupulously keeping pace with their holidays. No ethics are involved, just 'ethnic marketing.' " As the author scrutinizes the contents of other people's carts, they scrutinize hers as well, and she squirms a bit--even more so when she is recognized, which happens more than once. "I have to go down to Level 1," she writes, "before I can recover my tranquility as an anonymous customer." A dryly charming look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

March 1, 2023
The lights a child is enjoined to take note of by her mother are Christmas lights in a big-box superstore in Trois-Fontaines, in Cergy, an exurb northwest of Paris. Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, overheard this young mother on the moving walkway. This book is composed of notebook entries recording her visits to this superstore over a period of 22 months beginning in October 2012. Ernaux is a participant-observer where, "whether we like it or not, here we form a community of desires." Ernaux feels no discomfort shopping there; she is not a patrician slumming. She knows those waiting behind her at checkout judge and profile her by what she puts onto the conveyor belt, just as she assesses those ahead of her in line. This waiting in the checkout line--in English the word ""checkout"" suggesting an idiom of sexual appraisal--is just the narrow end of the funnel through which so many desires, grinding against a few basic needs, must pass. This slim book enlarges our sense of ourselves, insisting as it does on how alike we are.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.