Described by Annie Ernaux as the book she thought she would write all her life, Kızın Hikâyesi is a profound and beautiful examination of the impenetrable wall between our present selves and the selves we once had.
Just as there is a last lover, a last spring, there will surely be a last book, but there is no sign to recognise which one it is. From the beginning, the thought that I might die before I can write anything about the girl I call “the girl in 58” has been gnawing at my mind. One day, there will be no one left to remember her. What that girl went through, not someone else, will remain unexplained, will have been lived for nothing.
Summer 1958. Eighteen-year-old Annie Duchesne leaves her family, who run a small café-grocery store and shame her with their existence, to work as an instructor at a summer camp. For the first time she is alone and free. Among the sophisticated French youth, she is a young girl who longs to be like them, to feel like them. Soon, after her first night with the head instructor at the camp, she surrenders her will to his and finds herself crushed by the will and desire of another.
Described by Annie Ernaux as the book she thought she would write all her life, Kızın Hikâyesi is an extremely brave and frank text that brings together the Ernaux of today and the young girl of ’58.
“A profound and beautiful examination of the impenetrable wall that time has built between our present selves and the selves we once had. I have never read another book that so vividly captures the frustration and temptation this wall creates, and the heartbreak and longing we experience as we try to overcome it.”
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ANNIE ERNAUX was born in Lillebonne in 1940 into a working-class family and spent her childhood in Yvetot, Normandy. She grew up in an austere social environment, studied literature and taught literature for many years. In his first novel, Boş Dolaplar, he revealed the elements that combine personal experience and social history. While narrating issues such as social class advancement, marriage, women’s liberation, sexuality, abortion, illness, old age and death through her own experiences, she has always included social life and the cultural, political and historical events that constitute it in the background, and has written works that can be described as “social memory” literature; she has been awarded many prestigious awards, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. He still lives in Cergy.
SİREN İDEMEN has been working as a journalist and translator since the 1980s. She is one of the founders, editors and correspondents of Express, Roll, Bir+Bir magazine and website. The first book she translated was Bozkırdaki Gölgeler (Ricardo Güiraldes), and some of her recent books include Parçalanma (Emil Michel Cioran), Freud-Spinoza Mektuplaşması 1676-1938 (Michel Juffé), and Karanlık Dükkân (Georges Perec). İdemen has also translated Annie Ernaux’s Olay, Seneler, Babamın Yeri and Boş Dolaplar into Turkish.
TITLE
Book Title: Kızın Hikâyesi
Original Name: A Girl’s Story
Author: Annie Ernaux
Translation: Siren İdemen
Publisher: Can Yayınları
Series: Contemporary
Genre: Novel
Page Count: 152
