SOURCE: Sallis, James. Review of “I Remain in Darkness,” by Annie Ernaux. Review of Contemporary Fiction 20, no. 1 (spring 2000): 193-94.

In the following excerpt, Sallis praises Ernaux's “ambitious” combination of fictional and autobiographical details in “I Remain in Darkness.”

Annie Ernaux's work is remarkably of a piece, each book circling back to paraphrase, correct, emendate, and reinvest earlier ones. Einstein said of himself that in his life he'd had only one or two ideas. So it is with Ernaux, and she has made a life's agenda of drawing out the universe implicit in those ideas. Her work, with its blurring of fictional, autobiographical, and confessional elements, of the discursive and the representational, leads us virtually with each sentence to question supposed borders between finding and making, re-creation and reinvention; to question the notion of literature itself.

This present volume stands looking off down the hall at the author's earlier...