SOURCE: Jenkins, Victoria. “Annie Ernaux: A Life Full of Irony and Outrage.” Chicago Tribune Books (23 July 1995): 3, 5.

In the following review, Jenkins regards A Frozen Woman as a “disquieting book,” contending that “what ails Ernaux may be the ennui of privilege, the affliction of the upwardly mobile.”

In four largely autobiographical volumes, wildly popular in her native France, Annie Ernaux puts aspects of her life under a microscope—her memories of her father and her mother in A Man's Place and A Woman's Story, and her pathologically obsessive love affair with a married man in Simple Passion. In her latest, A Frozen Woman, she examines her transformation from a rollicking hoyden into an aggrieved and resentful wife and mother.

“Fragile and vaporish women, spirits with gentle hands, good fairies of the home who silently create beauty and order, mute, submissive women—search as I may, I cannot find many...