Up-dated version of the original review by Edith LaGraziana
No matter when it comes, if out of the blue or dragging on painfully, the death of a dear parent almost always arrives too soon and is the source of great grief. Those who are left behind follow very different strategies to cope with the loss… and writing about the departed is one of them. Without doubt the greater part of such works of sorrow ends unread, maybe even forgotten somewhere on the bottom of a drawer, not so the award-winning French book titled A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux, the author's literary homage to her late father written more than ten years after his death. In it she resurrects her relationship with the man who was her father and who never really managed to shake off his humble origins as the son of an illiterate farm labourer in Normandy although together with his wife he started a small café and grocery shop.