The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 19 February 1998
by Annie Ernaux
This little book is a memoir of an obsessive love affair between our protagonist and a mysterious married man. Spoken in her own words, in a spare and intense prose, we hear of a woman's love, her passion, and her constant occupation with the affair. The nameless man is invoked only through her brief meetings with him, then in the long painful times between, through her thoughts, imagination, jealousy and obsession. The book is explicit, yet doesn't entirely live up to the intensity of its opening chapter. In its brief 64 pages, though, are encapsulated the emotions of obsessive love. Throughout, this reader felt the sense of loss and the loss of control to a loved one, distant and independent. One does not have to have lived this sort of affair to relate to and engage with the feelings written here. The reader may come out the other side just as Ernaux does, with the exhausted memory and the scars of love.
(Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature.)
Also by Ernaux: [Shame]