Attention (for those of us who hadn’t been looking that way) turns to Annie Ernaux after her Nobel Prize win and to the body of work that got her there. A Man’s Place (1983, tr: Tanya Leslie, 1992) is the story of her father, a man for whom literature, despite the writer’s attempts, can’t stretch itself to fully express.

In trying to capture “a life governed by necessity” Ernaux notes that she has no right to embellish or sensationalise her father’s story and therefore favours neutrality, a trait that comes naturally. Certainly her delivery is distant, he has neither name nor face here, though she is concerned ultimately with something deeper, more inscrutable: his nature and purpose.

Her father, by this account, lived an unremarkable life. Born in rural Normandy, taken from school into work by his father, and a career from farmhand to shopkeeper across the span of two world wars. He’s a man moved by the times, not one that moves with them. A man who holds himself back, ashamed by his past and making of himself an outsider in the burgeoning middle class. A man that puts limits on his existence as he worries what others think and, worse, may say.

Ernaux does not have a perfect memory. She struggles to pull moments from the past (“Memory resists.”) and her vignettes are broken up with reflections on her struggle to produce the work, noting the limits of literature or how involuntary memories – not personal moments – are needed. Indeed, the personal is sidelined: for all her ‘I’ and ‘my’ there’s little feeling on show.

While we see social change, rural lives changed by industrialisation, Ernaux gives us the gaps that open in generations and the speed of change. The grandfather that could neither read nor write had a granddaughter who entered academia and read Proust. And her father could have made more of life without his own self-imposed barriers.

But was he happy? She doesn’t have the answers and can only speculate from select quotes and actions as to the depths of the man who was closest to her. However by putting him on the page he is preserved in a literary state, belonging now to his daughter’s bourgeois world, “the world that had scorned him”.