My TL;DR review of Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Tanya Leslie, is that if you have ever obsessed over a man, you can take comfort in the fact that Ernaux has also been there!
“From September last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man: for him to call me and come round to my place,” Ernaux states matter of factly in the early paragraphs. Simple Passion is the story of her affair with A, a married man, at the end of the 1980s. While Ernaux shares details about their relationship, she also states, “I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself.” Instead, she considers this a translation “into words” of how his “existence has affected her life.” According to the blurb, Ernaux blurs the line between fact and fiction, which adds to the dream-like quality of her obsessive actions. The reader is unsure what happened and what Ernaux wished to happen or not happen in certain circumstances.
When she wasn’t with A, she worried she would miss his phone calls if she left the house. As her obsession with A grew, it encompassed every aspect of her life. She stopped writing. She insisted that her sons, who didn’t live at home, inform her before visiting and leave if they were home when A came over. She describes this as “revealing only the barest practicalities that enabled me to conduct my liaison satisfactorily.” For reasons she knows do not make sense, Ernaux decides that A should never see her in the same outfit twice. So, her wardrobe becomes part of her obsession. But, then, most things about this period of her life do not make sense, which Ernaux freely admits.
As is customary with Ernaux, she interjects in her storytelling to question why she has chosen to write a specific scene that way or why she has chosen to write about her experience at all. I love this aspect of Ernaux’s work because it feels like a mini writing workshop, but I know some people find it takes them out of the narrative.
Simple Passion is as much about the mundanity of life between her meetings with A as it is about their love affair. In these ordinary moments of daily life, Ernaux shows the reader just how all-consuming her affair has become. It’s a short yet propulsive examination of what it means to lose yourself entirely for a man. I loved it!
Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Tanya Leslie, is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK and Ireland and by Seven Stories Press in the US and Canada.
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