A meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux A dryly charming Look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler.-- Kirkus Reviews For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection.
With her relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overLook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life..
She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society.
Through Ernaux\'s eyes, the superstore emerges as a great human meeting place, a spectacle, a space where we come into direct contact with difference.
Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual\'s role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism.
Recording her visits to a single superstore near Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls.
In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature.
A meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux A dryly charming Look at the way the French live now, through the sharp eyes of its most acclaimed chronicler.-- Kirkus Reviews For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection
