In 2016, I moved from Paris to Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Among the many other life changes, this meant finding my bearings among the new products — the hard cheeses, cut meats and strange sandwich spreads — and the unfamiliar layout of Albert Heijn, a chain of Dutch supermarkets, whose branding is a pale sky blue. It is significantly larger than my previously local, deep-red Franprix. With its narrow aisles, sharp corners and low ceilings, Franprix is an expanded corner shop: a place to whip around with a basket, not linger.
Albert Heijn is similar in pricing and demographic but different in other ways from the French Monoprix: a bright, white, still relatively small-scale aspirational store. Water misting over the lettuces. Somewhere to push a trolley around with the kids on a rainy afternoon, contemplating the toys, the clothes, the homeware, the makeup.
These are all city stores. To get anywhere near the scale of the shopping experience detailed by Nobel Prize-winning writer Annie Ernaux in “Look at the Lights, My Love,” her slim new book, I would have needed to go to the very gates of the city: an underground shopping mall at Porte de Choisy, its immense food store called, appropriately, Casino Géant (or “Giant”).
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“Look at the Lights, My Love” is a writer’s diary of the weekly food shop and all that attends it. It opens with an epigraph from writer Rachel Cusk’s memoir “Aftermath” invoking “the big supermarket down the road” — the one that is “always open.”
In the French edition of Ernaux’s book, the phrase “big supermarket” is translated as “hypermarché,” the massive kind of store moated by an immense parking lot that no one would ever think of walking to — in this way, not unlike the Auchan in the Paris suburb of Cergy that between November 2012 and October 2013 was the focus of Ernaux’s interest and close attention.
This Auchan is a superstore nested within an enormous shopping complex that boasts a hairdresser, a shoe shop, a key-cutting service; comparable to Walmart in the sense that its openness and reliability can always be counted on. At least, until very recently, when the pandemic emptied the shelves and the weekly visitation felt like a risk.
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Translated from the French with great intelligence and sensitivity by Alison Strayer, “Look at the Lights, My Love” is the sort of project that Ernaux has elsewhere called “something between literature, sociology and history.”
Stores such as Auchan are “part of the landscape of childhood for everyone,” she writes. That is, for “everyone under fifty.” It’s in these precisions that the historical and sociological force of her work registers.
Ernaux is not under 50: She can recall the very first time she entered a supermarket. It was in London in 1960, and it was called, simply, “Supermarket.” A new type of space, it constituted a whole new order of experience, calling forth new gestures and behaviors, new vocabularies.
Later, of course, these scaled-up “super” markets grew bigger still. I remember when a vast Sainsbury’s (branded orange) first opened on the outskirts of the small English town where I grew up — whose parents got jobs there, what it did to the collective sense of the town’s “center.”
The effect of Ernaux’s diary is to make this clear: These are the places where life happens, where the social orders are made apparent and reinforced, where societies are “built.” Her local big-box store is the site of ideas, feelings and consequential interactions, where the politics of class, race, gender and privilege get played out — along with more private fantasies and reveries.
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“Look at the lights, my love!” is an injunction a young mother makes to her child, pushing her up the moving walkway at Christmastime; Ernaux describes her own “rush of pleasure” at the prospect of interrupting her writing to drive to Auchan. Stores like this are frequented by the unemployed, adults with young children, the elderly, teenagers, the lonely, the homeless.
But, Ernaux points out, “when you think of it, there is no other space, public or private, where so many individuals so different in terms of age, income, education, geographic and ethnic background, and personal style, move about and rub shoulders with each other.”
They are the common grounds of a society: “The past forty years in France the majority of people visit roughly fifty times a year.” And yet, for writers, translators, editors and those otherwise in charge of what, by way of description, gets brought into the spaces of literature, “they are only starting to be considered as places worthy of representation.”
I taught the French version of Ernaux’s book once for a creative-writing and translation class — it was first published in 2014. Looking back, I was seeking my own instruction: I wanted to challenge myself to expand the field of the describable.
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My class and I field-tripped to the Casino at Place d’Italie: taking notes on the warehouse-high stacks of diapers and baby food, pasta and Ajax; the strip lighting; the colors and textures of the packaging; the snatches of overheard conversation; the peculiar social choreography between customer, checkout assistant, “pin” machine and hovering security guard taking place at the till. I wanted to test Ernaux’s claim: “We could definitely write life narratives from the perspective of superstores visited on a regular basis.”
In one of the entries, Ernaux describes finding someone’s discarded shopping list in her cart. In black ballpoint, it lists (among other items): “curly lettuce, flour, ham, lardons …” She compares it to her own: “Ricoré coffee, lady fingers, mascarpone …” It is a jolt — this glimpse into someone else’s way of being: what they like, how they cook, what’s habitual to them, what they can afford. Ernaux drinks Ricoré — a caffeinated product made from chicory.
Her diary makes an occasion to notice and then to begin reckoning with these differences. By way of her translation, and the implicit comparison this initiates between French and American shopping habits and, therefore, ways of being, Strayer extends the field further: letting brand names sometimes stand in their unfamiliarity; in other places, making judicious use of a footnote to explain the particularity of, say, Fnac — a “French chain specializing in cultural products (music, literature, movies, video games) and electronics (computers, TVs).”
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Reading “Look at the Lights, My Love,” I was reminded of a brilliant recent essay by the translator Anton Hur titled “The Mythical English Reader.” In it, he questions the category of imagined reader so often invoked by Anglophone editors of his work. The kind of reader unable to cope with foreign terms, who “is incredibly finicky, in a way that suggests people have been indulging him all his life instead of challenging him or encouraging him to try new and different things.”
Ernaux’s diary is a provocation: to accept these life scenes as worthy of our time and attention. Strayer’s translation takes this on within the context of English-language literature, expanding its capacity to hold such miscellany as the physiognomy of a suburban French superstore, the language of its promotions and instructions to the customer, together with a packet of Milical cookies, a wedge of Reblochon.
Kate Briggs is a writer and French-to-English translator. She is the author of “This Little Art,” a long essay on translation. “The Long Form,” a novel, will be published in the fall.
Look at the Lights, My Love
By Annie Ernaux
Yale University Press. 96 pp. $15.99.
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