SOURCE: Buckeye, Robert. Review of Shame, by Annie Ernaux. Review of Contemporary Fiction 19, no. 1 (spring 1999): 175-76.

In the following review, Buckeye applauds Ernaux's unflinching commitment to literary self-examination in Shame.

Each book of Annie Ernaux's is the same book, each an effort to explain, resolve and understand the original sin; that she was encouraged by her working-class parents to go further in school than they did so that she might have opportunities they did not; and that the result of her education was to drive a wedge between their lives and hers.

In Shame, her most recent exploration of the stigma she bears, she writes of the summer of 1952 when she was twelve years old, and dwells on three events: the Sunday her father tried to murder her mother; the trip she took with her father on a pilgrimage to Lourdes to fulfill a promise to her mother...