Dear readers,
“This one is INTENSE,” said the bookseller who rang up my copy of Annie Ernaux’s “The Use of Photography.” A shiver transited up and down my spine — a bookseller outburst is as good an omen as a four-leaf clover or an egg with a double yolk.
“In what way is it intense?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” she demurred.
Naturally her coyness functioned as a reading accelerant; I revved home and started the book minutes after purchase. “Intense” was accurate. It is a text better rated in units of pulse measurement than in English words, though I’ve tried my hardest below.
—Molly
“The Use of Photography,” by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie
Nonfiction, 2005 (in French) or 2024 (in English)
Ernaux is our pre-eminent intimate observer, a woman who invented a genre that hybridizes fiction, memoir and sociology. There is no sharper chronicler of class in contemporary letters, no writer more relentlessly attendant to the details of speech, dress, comportment and trajectory that tether us to our origins.
This book is no exception to the Ernaux program, though it is exceptional within her oeuvre. Unlike Ernaux’s other books, it is co-written; the collaborator is Marc Marie, a journalist and photographer who died in 2022. The book (translated into English by Alison L. Strayer) consists of 14 photographs attended by commentary from the pair, who were lovers. The photographs appear in chronological order covering a span of 10 months, from March 2003 until January 2004, and they depict the forensic evidence of sex.
In snapping the pictures, Ernaux writes, she strove to “capture the unreality of sex in the reality of what it leaves behind” — and in so doing, of course, proved the poignant futility of the gesture. There is nothing explicit or crude in the photographs. Instead, we find the humdrum jumble of living: discarded clothing, a teeming wastebasket, a shoe askew, chipped paint, cat food, a twisted extension cord. These are Just Things — not lifeless but certainly loveless, and quite moving beside the vivid written documentation of past passions.
Read if you like: “Coming,” by Jean-Luc Nancy with Adèle van Reeth; the Halina Reijn film “Babygirl” with Nicole Kidman; Leanne Shapton’s “Important Artifacts and Personal Property From the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry.”
Available from: Enthusiastic booksellers and librarians.
“Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory,” by Randall Collins
Nonfiction, 2009
Everyone knows that the best part of “The Godfather: Part 3” is the kitchen scene where Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) mutters “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in.” This describes my intensive reading of the sociologist Randall Collins, who is inarguably a genius and arguably a madman. Just when I think I’ve exited the thrilling tunnel of his complete works, a new one pops out of the woodwork to twist my mind into taffy.
“Violence” is among his masterworks. (Here’s another.) It is a work of lucid and compelling theory that attempts to clarify when and why moments of tension erupt into actual violence — as in, what are the conditions that cause the first punch to be thrown at a bar fight instead of the conflict dissolving into slurred threats? Or, what causes two children to come to blows on the playground instead of shuffling to opposite sides of the sandbox?
It is this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it transition that attracts Collins’s maverick intelligence for some 450 pages in which he covers domestic abuse, boxing matches, pillow fights, prison violence, excessive police force, soccer hooligans, crowd violence, mosh pits, the 9/11 cockpit fight and more.
At the end, in the requisite “practical conclusions and policy recommendations” section, Collins sincerely and convincingly suggests that drug gangs organize pistol duels instead of resorting to chaotic drive-by shootings and street fights. This is the kind of mind we are contending with when we read Collins: a fine and rare treasure upon earth.
Read if you like: The 1956 “docufiction” film “On the Bowery”; Michel Leiris; “When the Clock Broke,” by John Ganz (reviewed beautifully here by our own Jennifer Szalai).
Available from: Princeton University Press.
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