Exteriors

Exteriors by Annie Ernaux is a collection of brief observations — notes made between 1985 and 1992 in the Parisian suburb of Cergy, where Ernaux lived — that together constitute a sociological portrait of public space and the people who move through it. The pieces are fragments: a scene in a supermarket, a conversation overheard on the metro, a gesture witnessed in a shopping centre. Ernaux brings to these observations her characteristic precision and her sociological training, seeing in the ordinary choreography of everyday life the class structures, social codes, and human desires that usually remain invisible. Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, Exteriors is both a formal experiment in minimal prose and a genuinely illuminating document of ordinary French life at the end of the twentieth century.