“Shame”, by French writer and 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Annie Ernaux, was published in Turkish as “Utanç” in October in Can Yayınları’s Çağdaş series, translated by Siren İdemen.
The book centres on 5 June 1952, the Sunday when twelve-year-old Annie witnessed her father attempt to kill her mother. Returning to the event years later, Ernaux reconstructs the class hierarchies of provincial France, its Catholic morality, the silences within the family and the everyday codes of behaviour.
Exploring how shame is born, how it endures and how it changes one’s relationship with the world, the 96-page text is one of the core works in which the author began to read the intimate through the language of the social.
The New York Times Book Review wrote that the book’s “unflinchingly candid, finely wrought details give voice to a universal truth”, describing Ernaux’s shame as, at bottom, the shame of being human.
