As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent. The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin ""to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years. . .I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris."" And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman--who ""preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,"" fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter--for whom she worked long hours in the small cafÉ and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes ""the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me."" The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, ""I shall never hear the sound of her voice again--the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed."" Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality. A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Born into a working-class environment of pride and alcoholism, the woman of this story emerges strong-willed, ambitious, and full of human contradictions. She is Ernaux's mother, whose death after a harrowing decline into Alzheimer's disease compelled the best-selling French author to re-create her life. The result is a slender volume that, like its subject, discourages easy categorization. Ernaux describes it as a blend of literature, sociology, and history, but it is also a memoir, a tribute, and a healing exercise for the bereaved author-narrator. Ernaux's style shifts between detached, journalistic reportage and intimate self-analysis. Her poignant, personal novel may appeal more to readers of belles lettres--and of recovery literature--than to readers of popular fiction and biography. La Place , a companion work about Ernaux's father, is forthcoming from the publisher.-- Janet Ingraham, Spartan burg Cty. P.L., S.C. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Another unadorned and powerful novel from the award-winning, best-selling French author of Cleaned Out [BKL N 1 90]. In pure, simple, and restrained language, the narrator tells the story of her recently deceased mother. Taken out of school to work at age 12, her mother was determined to live a better life, and eventually she and her husband were able to purchase a small grocery and cafe. Handsome, robust, and blunt, she was an energetic businesswoman and a loving mother and wife with a lively interest in the world and respect for reading, fashion, and proper behavior. The narrator, struggling to remain objective, follows the more difficult course of her own relationship with her mother, from puberty to her mother's last day. Ernaux describes the eerie decline age brings, exacerbated in this case by Alzheimer's, with the calm and honesty that follow deep grief and reflection. ~--Donna Seaman

For this Prix Renaudot-winning author, childhood was not just a time of life but a cottage industry. A trilogy of books intersect at her youth: the story of Ernaux's father, told in La Place ; her semi-autobiographical first novel, Cleaned Out ; and A Woman's Story . In this work, the woman of the title is the author's mother and the story is a brief, aching requiem for an intense but qualified relationship. Ernaux's mother (she is never named), who was born in a small town in Normandy where she saw the fruition of the ``only ambition which lay within her reach: running a grocery business,'' finally succumbs to Alzheimer's disease. This life's very commonness presents difficulties for her daughter who is both ashamed of her mother and aware of the immense difficulties the woman surmounted to give her daughter something better. ``It was only when my mother . . . became history that I started to feel less alone and out of place in a world ruled by words and ideas, the world where she had wanted me to live.'' (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved