A Man's Place

By: Annie Ernaux, Tanya Leslie

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, 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 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, 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.

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A fantastic book

A great book that I found developmental and maturative for a young man coming of age such as myself. I found this book intelligent and highly educational. I found great relation with the protagonist and I further highly recommend this book.

Love Ernaux's work, but not the narration

The narration, by the woman who performs all but one of Ernaux's books in English on Audible, is not *quite* as annoying in this book, and the memoir is so interesting that I was able to get through it and even enjoy it. But I had to return another title of Ernaux's where the narration is unbearable — overly enunciated, chirpy, breathlessly animated. Just all wrong for the sense and tone of the book.

The epitome of understated elegance

Beautiful, spare writing that skims the waves of a man’s life. The art is in the particular waves that are touched and the order of the touching. The author’s dilemmas resonate deeply. I think a lot now about the cultural divide between me and my own parents, enabled by my parents themselves in their desire to give me more than they could have ever dreamed of for themselves.

Superb

A beautifully rendered and intimate portrait of a father by a daughter who achieved his vision for her.

Great book but wrong narrator

This is one of a series of audible books of which i love the text, but find it difficult listening because of the narrator. This narrator, in my mind, speaks in a kind of breathless voice that seems to want to impute meaning and emotion and profundity to every last phrase – but when you read the blurb for this book, one of the keys to this book is that she is a "cold observer". She says herself early on that she realizes she needs to be objective, not use artfulness. She is trying to appraise/appreciate her father later in life by removing herself. That is the effort that gives meaning to everything she is describing. When the narrator then tries to breathe subjectivity into the book, speaking as if she were the young woman or girl in the middle of these experiences, it's working against the entire point of the book. I'd prefer even someone reading the book flatly.