L-Avveniment 

by Annie Ernaux

translated into Maltese by Claudine Borg

published by Faraxa, 2024

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.

She chooses to do this by compelling the reader to sit at the edge of anxiety and exhaustion, following her struggles with Catholic moral values in dealing with life, death and sexuality, graphically delivering a literary reality in its crudest form.

Originally entitled L’Événement (The Happening, also made into a film with the same title in 2021), I am not sure whether this strong piece of creative writing promotes or condemns abortion.

Certainly, through her captivating intimate diary, Ernaux discloses the trauma a young woman goes through when she finds herself in this desperate situation, risking going to prison for committing a crime.

Publicly admitting her pregnancy, let alone being found guilty of an illegal abortion, could then be construed as a self-inflicted social suicide that would condemn her by her conservative pious family, exclude her from the university milieu not only for getting pregnant before marriage but worse for deciding to kill her natural progeny.

In France, it was only in 1975 that the minister of public health, Simone Veil, successfully legislated a law decriminalising abortion, after an enormous amount of hard work, public protests and fiery debates. In today’s Europe, only Poland and Malta still maintain highly restrictive laws on abortion, which dates back to Egyptian, Greek and Roman times.

A gripping, bold story that, at the end, unfurls like a soiled carpet, leaving us to wonder whether abortion is prohibited because it is wrong or whether it is wrong because it is illegal

The Maltese version

The Maltese version of this well-known piece of French literature in the careful hands of Claudine Borg, head of the Translation, Terminology and Interpretation Department of the University of Malta, comes at a time when the local public debate on decriminalising abortion has still to seriously take off.

In Maltese, besides the urge to rapidly finish reading this short account of 60 pages, the story maintains its original stimulating style in describing the young woman’s determination, in spite of a series of emotional upheavals hardly unstiffened by visits to Parisian Catholic chapels, idle coffee breaks at brasseries and trying to lead a normal life with her colleagues, while hiding her daily convulsions including her impeding cravings and sickness.

Annie Ernaux discloses the trauma a young woman goes through when she finds herself in a desperate situation. Photo: Shutterstock.com

Borg, as she explains in an endnote, does not shy away from idioms and audacious vocabulary in Maltese rendering the read better suited for those whose sensitivity is not very delicate.

Braving all odds, the translator delivers the French stylishness of Ernaux in its original smart version where the narrator continuously analyses and examines her unfortunate status of an unwanted pregnancy. The narration is dispassionate. Even the passages about sex are clinical.

She does not even hold her calamities against the presumed father.

Her ability to refrain from empathy leaves the reader an uninvolved spectator.  

It is only at the end, when, in the bathroom of her flat, gory life and death combine over the toilet, that we feel relieved, unfortunately to the point that there is little or no sympathy to the tragic misery of the human ‘thing’.

A gripping, bold story that, at the end, unfurls like a soiled carpet, leaving us to wonder whether abortion is prohibited because it is wrong or whether it is wrong because it is illegal, where it was or is so.