Ernaux, Annie. Look at the Lights, My Love. Yale Univ. (Margellos World Republic of Letters). Apr. 2022. 96p. tr. from French by Alison L. Strayer. ISBN 9780300268218. pap. $16. MEMOIR

Ernaux’s knife-sharp, embedded-in-the-world look at everyday life has won her an adoring worldwide audience as well as fussing from some critics that she’s too common in her focus—even after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What will they think of her new work, a meditation on big-box superstores and what they reveal about us as a society? The book is really a memoir, following her year-plus-long visits to a single superstore in Paris, a place that might seem the epitome of mindless consumerism but that she portrays here as a “great human meeting place, a spectacle," something akin to a village green or marketplace in the surprising intimacy with which everyone—both customers and staff—relates. She’ll use the approach that has always made her work so distinctive, which she aptly described at an event at New York City’s Albertine Bookstore just a few days after winning the Nobel: “I am the place where it happened,” she says of her rendering of experience. “It traverses me, goes through me, but it is not unique.” She feels a strong responsibility to look carefully, to explore—a favorite word of hers—and sees herself as “an instrument of the novel [or other writing], telling not just a woman’s story but a working-class woman’s story.” From a modest background, with an education and accomplishments far surpassing those of her parents, Ernaux calls herself a transfuge de classe—a sort of defector or gate crasher in the social world—and the theme of crossing classes has always underlain her writing. It will certainly feature in her superstore book. After all, superstores are where we all come together, and Ernaux's look at class, culture, and the capitalist enterprise will surely illuminate.