Positions

Annie Ernaux’s father died exactly two months after she passed her exams for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labour, Ernaux’s father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux’s cold observation in A Man’s Place reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France. Over the course of the book, Annie Ernaux grows up to become the uncompromising observer now familiar to the world, while her father matures into old age with a staid appreciation for life as it is and for a daughter he cautiously even reluctantly admires. The bizarre world of a motley crew of prostitutes-the painted shadows-their customers, their friends and their families, in the old town of Nice, is portrayed in this arresting first novel. A beautiful and enigmatic transvestite prostitute, who becomes a transsexual after an operation in Casablanca, is the central figure to whom the other characters are drawn. Her name is Epiphanie, the significance of which is revealed through the depiction of a harrowing childhood, her blind mother's testimony and her conversations with a reinstated priest, Damien, who equates her with the martyr St. Agatha. Painted Shadows is a kaleidoscope of emotions and incidents, whirling color and vibrant language. The strains and lyrics of Berthe Sylva and Charles Trenet's chansons, played on the gramophone of the local haunt, the Delsevy, unite the characters and the action in a vivid, hothouse atmosphere that is constantly changing, constantly entertaining and disturbingly erotic. Translated by James Kirkup. A daughter must come to terms with her formative years as she writes an unflinching portrait of her father, a cafe owner whose life has become very alien to her.