Struggles with Catholic moral values in dealing with life, death and sexuality

Charles Xuereb
June 8, 2025

Book review: L-Avveniment, by Annie Ernaux. Translated into Maltese by Claudine Borg

French author Annie Ernaux, Noble Prize winner for Literature in 2022, in her book L’Événement, originally published in 2000, honestly bares her heart with readers by choosing to describe a series of personal painful realisations: the undesired metamorphosis of her own body and what she is permitted to do with it.

In this short autobiographical narration at the threshold of her identity as an adult, Ernaux divulges her own tribulations when, as a university student back in 1963, she travailed in depressing solitude to find where she could illegally abort the unwanted ‘thing’ in her womb.

Continued: https://timesofmalta.com/article/maltese-translation-ernaux-l-evenement-hits-close-home.1110947