GETTING LOST

A new translation of the diary on which the recent Nobel Prize winner based her 1991 novel, Simple Passion.

In a narrative that reveals Ernaux’s surgical process of inward observation, she chronicles an all-consuming yearlong affair with a Russian diplomat whom she met during a literary junket in Leningrad in the fall of 1988. Known for her meticulously hewn autobiographical work since her first novel, Cleaned Out, appeared in 1974, Ernaux published this diary in France in 2001. In the preface, the author asserts that, unlike the fictionalized version of the affair in Simple Passion, her diary contains something “raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.” Indeed, the text is a well-rendered yet agonizing, claustrophobic journey. Ernaux writes about how she and “S,” more than a decade older than her and married, met in Paris, where he was stationed in a cultural capacity. Readers watch as the narrator waits in self-abnegation for his call, anticipating the moment they will meet again. Everything else in the world falls away amid their passion, and Ernaux offers tantalizing details about S: tall and handsome, given to drinking too much vodka and waxing nostalgic about Brezhnev and Stalin, and, though a wonderful lover, somewhat comical as he won’t remove his socks. The author is consistently clear about her level of devotion during this time: “I feel no sense of caution or restraint, nor do I have any doubts, finally. Something has come full circle. I commit the same errors as in the past but they are no longer errors. There is only beauty, passion, desire.” Ernaux also discusses the influence of Simone de Beauvoir and notes how her own work is full of “egocentric suffering. Yet I know that it is through this layer of suffering that I communicate with the rest of humanity.”

A deeply revealing, intimate work that fully demonstrates the author’s exquisite writing process.