The Nobel Prize 

In 2025, I read 50 books. Of those, thirteen were Fiction.  Of that that dozen, six were by Nobel laureates in Literature: four of whom I never read before. Early in the year, I was talking to one of my well-read friends about Nobel laureates in Literature. She reads the leading author of a country before she visits for the first time.  She had read Blindness by Jose Saramago before visiting Portugal. He won the Nobel Prize in 1998. I decided to read it and was stunned.  It was terrifying. If asked for a genre for this book, I would say Horror! Brilliant and frightening.

Next was The Vegetarian by 2024 winner Han Kang.  Another beautiful and haunting novel.  When I hear the word vegetarian now, I think of the crazy beginning of this novel. Until this year I never read Ernest Hemingway the 1954 laureate.  I finally read The Old Man and the Sea and loved it. Later I read In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who won the prize in 1970.  I had meant to read this novel for more than a decade. It is so good.  It says so much about life in the Soviet GULAGs that could not be said in the relentless reporting of The GULAG Archipelago. 

The fifth was A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux the 2022 winner. I bought the book at The Red Wheelbarrow English-language bookstore across from Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in November and read it on the plane back to America.  It’s about her father and her family’s life in the years after World War II.  On a long flight back from Asia, I re-read The Remains of the Day by 2017 Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. I have read all of Ishiguro’s books.  This one is my favorite.

I read a history book by the 1953 Nobel laureate: The Great Democracies by Winston Churchill, bringing my total to seven winners of the Nobel Prize in literature. Next year I plan to read Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, A Happening by Ernaux, and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway.

Leading the list of the other seven novels I read was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.  It is a novel that begins two decades after World War II but is very much about The Holocaust. It unfolds slowly showing how that tragedy radiated through life far from the horror of the camps. 

Another friend recommendation was Piranesi, a strange fantasy novel with many references to C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. My wife read the John Grisham novels The Firm and The Exchange to me on long car trips.  The Firm was great.  The Exchange not so much. 

The last three are re-readings: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera was just ss strange and good a decade after my first reading. Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers confirmed my delight in the world of Lord Peter Wimsey. This month I re-read The Killer Angels by Michael Shaaara.  I first read this book in 1980 after three years as a tank commander in West Germany. I toured Gettysburg soon after and could not believe Lee ordered Pickett to charge across that field or Hood to charge up Little Round Top.  In re-reading it seemed much clearer that Longstreet was the moral center of this brilliant story. 

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux, a Review

 

Annie Ernaux’s A Man’s Place is a short book that carries the moral weight of a much larger one. It is nominally about her father—an unremarkable café-grocer in rural Normandy—but in truth it is about class, shame, memory, and the price of social mobility. Ernaux, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature for turning her own life into a tool of social analysis, already has her method fully formed here: she strips language down until it is almost clinical, refusing lyricism, nostalgia, or sentimental rescue.

The book begins with her father’s death and then works backward, reconstructing the man he was and the world that shaped him. He came from the French peasantry, left school early, and spent his life clawing his way into a fragile petit-bourgeois respectability. He was proud, suspicious of refinement, quick to anger, and deeply anxious about not belonging. Ernaux refuses to romanticize him. He was not a noble worker or a tragic hero. He was simply a man whose entire emotional life was structured by class hierarchy.

What makes A Man’s Place so unsettling is that Ernaux includes herself in the indictment. Through education, books, and speech, she escaped the world her father inhabited. But escape came with betrayal. Every new word she learned widened the distance between them. Every gesture of middle-class ease was a silent rebuke to his roughness. She describes how he became self-conscious around her, afraid of saying the wrong thing, aware that he was being measured by standards he did not choose. This is not a story of generational conflict in the abstract; it is the lived experience of social mobility as emotional violence.

Ernaux’s style is a lovely instrument for this subject. The prose is flat, precise, almost bureaucratic. That is not a lack of feeling—it is an ethical decision. She refuses to decorate her father’s life with the kinds of language that would falsify it. His world was not poetic; it was practical, anxious, and constrained. By writing this way, she honors his reality while also exposing its limits.

The book also quietly dismantles the idea that personal identity can ever be separated from social structure. Her father’s masculinity, pride, and emotional reticence were not personality quirks; they were survival strategies in a world that punished weakness and ignorance. Ernaux shows how deeply those strategies shaped her childhood—and how impossible it was for him to adapt when she moved into a different class universe.

There is no reconciliation at the end of A Man’s Place. Ernaux does not claim to have healed the rift between herself and her father. Instead, she offers something more honest: understanding without absolution. She sees him clearly, and she sees herself clearly too—as someone who benefited from the very systems that made his life small.

In less than a hundred pages, Ernaux achieves something rare: a portrait of a man that is neither sentimental nor cruel, and a memoir that refuses to flatter its author. A Man’s Place is not about loving your parents despite their flaws. It is about recognizing how history, class, and language decide what kinds of lives are possible—and what kinds of love those lives can sustain.