SOURCE: Genova, Pamela A. Review of L'événement, by Annie Ernaux. World Literature Today 75, no. 1 (winter 2001): 136-37.

In the following review, Genova compliments Ernaux's attempts to present a literary examination of an emotionally-troubling incident in L'événement.

A new book by Annie Ernaux, L'événement, not only presents a first-person narrative describing the events of a difficult experience for a young woman in Rouen in 1963; it also simultaneously offers a study in memory and time, in the dynamics of the elusive nature of human emotion and the individual attempt to recapture, reexperience, and translate in writing an episode of deeply emotive subjectivity.

The “event” of the title, quite frankly, is an abortion, the experience that changed the life of a twenty-three-year-old woman faced with the age-old desperation, loneliness, and fear that so many women have encountered in the same daunting and ambivalent situation, particularly given...