The Young Man by Annie Ernaux audiobook review – anatomy of an affair

The Nobel winner explores the dynamics of her relationship with a student 30 years her junior in an intimate, taboo-breaking memoir

In Annie Ernaux’s autobiographical story, translated by Alison L Strayer, the author recalls a past affair with a student who was 30 years her junior. “Often I have made love to force myself to write … I hoped that orgasm, the most violent end to waiting that can be, would make me feel certain that there is no greater pleasure than writing a book.” In other words, she is keen to break her writer’s block. But, to both their surprise, the affair becomes “a relationship that we longed to take to the limit, without really knowing what that meant”.

The Young Man is Ernaux’s shortest memoir yet, clocking just over half an hour in audio. But brevity doesn’t impede her ability to get to the heart of the intimate dynamics or external pressures of a situation that many others view as taboo. The couple get disapproving looks in restaurants, which, rather than leaving Ernaux cowed, reinforces her “determination not to hide my affair with a man who could have been my son”.

Tavia Gilbert is the narrator whose reading, though a little mannered at times, underscores the distance Ernaux puts between herself and her lover, allowing her to observe him from the vantage point of middle age and from a different economic and social strata. “He tore me away from my generation but I was not part of his,” she notes. By the time they break up, near the turn of the millennium, the book that she had been struggling with two years prior is magically complete.

• Available via Dreamscape Media, 34min

Further listening

Sanctuary
Marina Warner, William Collins, 12hr 56min
Subtitled Ways of Telling, Ways of Dwelling, Warner’s essay series explores the concept of human refuge and shelter, from the ancient world to the present day. Read by the author.

All the Other Mothers Hate Me
Sarah Harman, 4th Estate, 11hr 13min
Georgina Sadler narrates this crime novel about Florence, an ex-girlband singer struggling to find her place among the parents at her 10-year-old son’s private school. When a boy in his class disappears, she is forced to turn sleuth to protect her family.