Look at the Lights, My Love: (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)

A meditation on the big-box superstore, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux   For half a century, French writer Annie Ernaux has restlessly explored stories and subjects often considered unworthy of artistic reflection. In this exquisite meditation, Ernaux turns her attention to the phenomenon of the big-box superstore, a ubiquitous feature of modern life that has received scant attention in literature.   Recording her visits to a single superstore in Paris for over a year, Ernaux captures the world that exists within its massive walls. Culture, class, and capitalism converge, reinscribing the individual’s role and rank within society while absorbing individuality into the machine of mass consumerism. Through Ernaux’s eyes, the superstore emerges as a “great human meeting place, a spectacle,” a space where we come into direct contact with difference. She notes the unexpectedly intimate encounters between customers; how our collective desires are dictated by the daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms of the marketplace; and the ways that the built environment reveals the contours of gender and race in contemporary society.   With her relentless powers of observation, Annie Ernaux takes the measure of a place we thought we knew, calling us to question the experiences we overlook and to gaze more deeply into ordinary life.

About the Author :
Annie Ernaux is the winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the author of more than twenty books, including The Years, A Woman’s Story, A Man’s Place, Shame, and Simple Passion. Alison L. Strayer is an award-winning writer and translator.

Review :
“Translated from the French with great intelligence and sensitivity by Alison Strayer. . . . Ernaux’s diary is a provocation: to accept these life scenes as worthy of our time and attention.”—Kate Briggs, Washington Post A New Yorker Best of the Week Pick “[Ernaux’s] chief mode is curiosity, translated with perfect, inquisitive casualness by Alison L. Strayer. She peeks into shopping carts, eavesdrops on conversations, notices the gender dynamics of salesmanship.”—Laura Marris, Times Literary Supplement “[Ernaux] studies the ‘great human meeting place’ of the big-box superstore, keeping a diary of her visits to a mall near Paris and analyzing what it means to confront our desires and those of others in the marketplace.”—New Yorker “A fascinating read. . . . Ernaux provides an ensemble of potent subtexts dealing with practices and people linked through commerce and commodities.” —Sharmila Purkayastha, The Telegraph (India) “The subject at the heart of Look at the Lights, My Love is what we reveal of ourselves in the strange sterility of the store. . . . Ernaux’s singular style conveys both the soullessness and the dreamlike charm of the place.”—Tess Little, Literary Review “What makes Look at the Lights a work of art, rather than a manifesto, is the sheer sensuousness of Ernaux’s language . . . the subtle visual, auditory, and tactile details that fill the pages and lend firsthand credibility to the argument. . . . [Ernaux] reanimates a shared humanity that consumerism has flattened out.”—J. Howard Rosier, The Atlantic “Look at the Lights, My Love plays a formal sleight-of-hand in the best way, with the feel of a dashed-off journal but the felt experience of a deeply philosophical meditation on the nature of shopping, voyeurism, late-stage capitalism, class, race, and desire.”—Adrienne Raphel, Paris Review Daily A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2023 Praise for the French Edition:   “A wonderful addition to Annie Ernaux’s life writings . . . [and] a fascinating contribution to contemporary literature.”—Geneviève Alvarado, World Literature Today   “[A] beautiful book. . . . With rigor and tenderness, Annie Ernaux shows herself. . . . If she says ‘I,’ it is to hear others better. From the margins of a suburban superstore, she illuminates the heart of our lives.”—Jean Birnbaum, Le Monde