FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
Tavia Gilbert expertly narrates this revealing memoir by Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022. Gilbert masterfully inhabits Ernaux’s inner life by revealing the angst and sensuality of the affair she had four decades ago, as revealed in her journal entries. Gilbert’s conversational tone is ideal for the interior monologues in this work. Ernaux is a meticulous notetaker. Her Russian apparatchik lover keeps his socks on while they make love, wears French designer clothes, and wants her, in part, because of her literary fame. This self-portrait of Ernaux, who was 12 years older than her Soviet amour, is told chronologically and unsparingly. Ironically, the ending section, where the sex is just a memory, reveals rich elements of her life as a public intellectual. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
07/11/2022
In this entrancing work, French writer Ernaux (The Years) relives the passionate yet devastating memories of a whirlwind affair through her own diary entries. From November 1989 to April 1990, when she was a writer and teacher living in Paris, Ernaux became besotted with a married Russian diplomat at the Soviet embassy. Set against the political, social, and literary events that defined the parameters of their relationship, Ernaux’s narrative traces her secret love affair with “Mr. S,” a man 13 years her junior, as she recalls falling under S’s narcissistic hold (“a lovely hell”) and the “state of nameless terror” she endures between his phone calls and brief visits. Their affair revives old and painful memories that threaten her self-worth: an abortion in 1964, a failed marriage, and recurring dreams of her mother’s death. Ernaux’s writing is astonishingly candid as she illustrates the ways loss, heartache, and love intersect with her craft as a writer: “I am consumed with desire.... I want perfection in love, as I believe I attained a kind of perfection in writing with A Woman’s Story. That can only happen through giving, while throwing all caution to the wind. I’m already well on my way.” Fans will relish every scintillating detail. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"Annie Ernaux’s work presents a breathtakingly frank, fearless, many-sided account of the female experience during the past century."
—Liesl Schillinger, Oprah Daily
"The almost primitive directness of her voice is bracing. It’s as if she’s carving each sentence onto the surface of a table with a knife. . . . Getting Lost is a feverish book. . . . it’s one of those books about loneliness that, on every page, makes you feel less alone."
—Dwight Garner, New York Times (also a 2022 Staff Critic Pick)
"Like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, Ernaux’s affair should be counted as one of the great liaisons of literature. ... I suspect the book will become a kind of totem for lovers: a manual to help them find their centre when, like Ernaux, they are lost in love. All her books have the quality of saving frail human details from oblivion. Together they tell, in fragments, the story of a woman in the twentieth century who has lived fully, sought out pain and happiness equally and then committed her findings truthfully on paper. Her life is our inheritance."
—Ankita Chakraborty, The Guardian
"To read [the diary entries] is to encounter something like a pentimento, the revelation of writing underneath other writing—a quality that already suffuses so much of her work. We can, of course, marvel at what Ernaux was able to make of these entries in Simple Passion. But they offer their own distinct and potent pleasures, the rare, delightful, occasionally shocking intimacies of reading someone else’s private thoughts."
—Sophie Haigney, The Paris Review
"In this entrancing work, French writer Ernaux (The Years) relives the passionate yet devastating memories of a whirlwind affair through her own diary entries. From November 1989 to April 1990, when she was a writer and teacher living in Paris, Ernaux became besotted with a married Russian diplomat at the Soviet embassy. Set against the political, social, and literary events that defined the parameters of their relationship, Ernaux’s narrative traces her secret love affair with 'Mr. S,' a man 13 years her junior, as she recalls falling under S’s narcissistic hold ('a lovely hell') and the 'state of nameless terror' she endures between his phone calls and brief visits. Their affair revives old and painful memories that threaten her self-worth: an abortion in 1964, a failed marriage, and recurring dreams of her mother’s death. Ernaux’s writing is astonishingly candid as she illustrates the ways loss, heartache, and love intersect with her craft as a writer: 'I am consumed with desire.... I want perfection in love, as I believe I attained a kind of perfection in writing with A Woman’s Story. That can only happen through giving, while throwing all caution to the wind. I’m already well on my way.' Fans will relish every scintillating detail."
—Publishers Weekly
"[Getting Lost] is a scabbed-over wound. Its beauty and meaning — which are considerable — come from the tension between the diary’s immediacy, candor, and occasional luridness, against its intellectual heft as an artifact documenting Ernaux’s artistic process. Getting Lost marries the high with the low, the petty with the sacred, the cerebral with the profane, in an exhilarating descent into abject desire."
—Mariah Kreutter, Astra Magazine
"Across over twenty books and for the better part of the last five decades, Ernaux has gathered, broken, and reassembled the infinite, singular matter of her history—alongside the history of France in the aftermath of two world wars—in search of (as Madeline Schwartz writes in a review of Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story) “a story that is fully continuous, a story without gaps.” Perhaps no other literary figures, save Proust or Knausgaard, have come as near to achieving so Promethean a project."
—Jamie Hood, The Baffler
"Beautiful writing can be a way of 'masking power.' Ernaux's particular style — stripped back, forthright, unadorned — is an attempt to drop the mask, to write unsentimentally and with great dignity about class, and class mobility, and gender." — Lauren Elkin, Lux Magazine
Library Journal - Audio
04/01/2023
Nobel laureate Ernaux (The Years) publishes her unaltered journal from when she was a woman obsessed, wholly consumed by her affair with married Russian diplomat "S." Their time together, from October 1988 to November 1989, centers on sex and her preoccupation with him, while in the background the Berlin Wall falls and Ernaux ruminates over her reading of Anna Karenina. She is frequently miserable, as S is often unavailable, and she jealously assumes she is one of several mistresses. Each day without a call or visit reminds her of previous relationships and how much she focuses on providing what this man wants. After S moves back to Russia, she begins to recover and regains focus on her work. In retrospect when reading over her journal, she decides the whole episode was "almost shameful, a waste of energy." Narrator Tavia Gilbert does an excellent job conveying Ernaux's vulnerability and intensity during this tumultuous love affair filled with passion and despair. VERDICT An interesting choice for libraries where patrons are looking for more of Ernaux's work, but an optional purchase for most.—Christa Van Herreweghe
FEBRUARY 2023 - AudioFile
Tavia Gilbert expertly narrates this revealing memoir by Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022. Gilbert masterfully inhabits Ernaux’s inner life by revealing the angst and sensuality of the affair she had four decades ago, as revealed in her journal entries. Gilbert’s conversational tone is ideal for the interior monologues in this work. Ernaux is a meticulous notetaker. Her Russian apparatchik lover keeps his socks on while they make love, wears French designer clothes, and wants her, in part, because of her literary fame. This self-portrait of Ernaux, who was 12 years older than her Soviet amour, is told chronologically and unsparingly. Ironically, the ending section, where the sex is just a memory, reveals rich elements of her life as a public intellectual. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine
