WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
A Frozen Woman charts Ernaux's teenage awakening, and then the
parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to
fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict
between the two. And then she is thirty years old, a teacher married to
an executive, mother of two infant sons. She looks after their nice
apartment, raises her children. And yet, like millions of other women,
she has felt her enthusiasm and curiosity, her strength and her
happiness, slowly ebb under the weight of her daily routine. The very
condition that everyone around her seems to consider normal and
admirable for a woman is killing her.
While each of Ernaux's books contain an autobiographical element, A
Frozen Woman, one of Ernaux's early works, concentrates the spotlight
piercingly on Annie herself. Mixing affection, rage and bitterness, A
Frozen Woman shows us Ernaux's developing art when she still relied on
traditional narrative, before the shortened form emerged that has since
become her trademark.