A little gem of a book ... Ernaux repeatedly stuns by the depth and honesty of her psychological observations, as she does by her frugal and unsentimental language. The Other Girl, translated with touching subtlety by Alison L Strayer, is no exception ... Touching ... Beautiful and profound ... Ernaux is one of the great writers of our time, and a truly worthy Nobel.
Ernaux’s project is interested in the strange and impossible nature of memory as much as it is in the specific events that shaped the author ... Ernaux’s striving to collect her memories is an undertaking to understand herself as much as it is a testing of the boundaries of language and image
One reads this book with a kind of sacrilegious thrill ... Ernaux’s genius lies in bringing almost clinical objectivity to the most intimate material, like a surgeon performing an auto-endoscopy ... The thinness of the material before her … means that she is often reduced to ‘chasing a shadow' ... The Other Girl will be read eagerly by the author’s many devotees, even if it is among her less substantial works in scope…and achievement ...
Everything we see is strangely familiar but altered.
Gently heartbreaking ... Poignant ... Poetic and raw but never maudlin, this beautiful meditation on a very particular kind of grief will resonate with anyone trying to process a major loss of their own.
