Book 1 of my 20 Books of Summer: Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion (France)

Translated by Tanya Leslie

Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022. The feeling I have when reading her novels and works of memoir in translation is the same as I had when reading Deborah Levy’s trilogy of living autobiography (Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate – the link clicks through to my review): I find the work relatable at times, very easy to digest, yet highly literary and brimming with intelligence. I’m quite sure Levy will have read Ernaux’s books.

The always interesting and stylishly-jacketed Fitzcarraldo publications have published translations of much of Ernaux’s work over the last few years. I was very nearly put off it though, after starting with The Years, first in the original French (hard!), then in English translation (by Alison L. Strayer). It was beautifully written but intensely impersonal: it is essentially a social history of 20th century France and a work of collective autobiography, and brilliant no doubt, but I yearn for the personal, through an engagement with character, whether fictionalized or not. Though Ernaux nails universal truths in The Years, and puts them so eloquently:

“everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. … In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.”

Second, early this year, just after dad had died of late stage Parkinsons, with no speech and consumed by dementia, and while my mother-in-law continued to fade into the fog of Alzheimers, I read I Remain in Darkness (translated by Tanya Leslie). This is a short book written in journal form and covering Ernaux’s frail mother’s decline into dementia, and her own feelings of ambivalence, guilt and devastation. I took screenshots at the time of passages that resonated with me:

“I often dream of her, picturing her the way she was before her illness. She is alive and yet she has been dead. When I wake up, for a few moments I am certain that she is still living in this dual form, at once dead and alive, like those characters in Greek mythology whose souls have been ferried twice across the River Styx.”

Finally, I’ve just finished Simple Passion, which is so short that I finished it in a day, and which deals with sexual obsession, detailing in obsessive detail a lightly fictionalized woman’s affair with a married, and therefore mostly unavailable, man. The times when they are together are barely touched upon. Instead, she describes the empty stretches of time between meetings, when, as she goes through the motions of everyday life, her attention is focused myopically on the moment when she can see him again. She resents leaving the house in case the phone rings, when she buys clothes it is with his appreciation in mind, when she buys groceries she buys extras, almonds, whisky, that he enjoys.

It feels confessional, and indeed Ernaux’s work Getting Lost is based on the same relationship and takes the formal of a journal, kept by Ernaux during her clandestine love affair with a married attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. As she writes towards the end of Simple Passion:

“The prospect of publication brings me closer to people’s judgment and the ‘normal’ values of society. (Having to answer questions such as ‘is it autobiography?’ and having to justify this or that may have stopped many books from seeing the light of day, except in the form of a novel, which succeeds in saving appearances.)” 

At just 48 pages in length, Simple Passion distils experience into its most concentrated form and dissects in fascinating close-up the vicissitudes of all-consuming joy and pain brought by a doomed affair, and I devoured it virtually in one sitting. A good start to this year’s summer reading.