I requested this book as a friend of mine raves about anything written by Annie Ernaux. Unfortunately going on this novel I can’t say that I agree. I found it very self indulgent and repetitive and the subject matter wasn’t to my taster either. Perhaps I need to read some of her previous work to get a better sense of her writing but I can’t say I’ll be rushing off to do this!

This book is incredible, as all Annie Ernaux books are. I posted about this on twitter and will post a review on instagram, and again on twitter when I have my physical copy. I have posted a review on Waterstones and it is not currently available to review on Amazon.

In 1993 Ernaux published Simple Passion about an affair she had in 1988-89, and in this book (2001) Ernaux published the contemporaneous journals that she wrote about the same affair. Ernaux writes (and Strayer translates) about her passion with emotional detachment, and indeed she writes in her journal: “If one day people read this journal, they’ll see that there was indeed ‘alienation in the work of Annie Ernaux,’ and not only in the work but even more so in her life.”
I found this book frustrating and fascinating, probably in equal measure, and overall I found Ernaux’s craft beguiling.
Frustrating as Ernaux is only looking for a “passion”, which she has clearly had several times in the past, as she compares her sensual pleasure to other affairs, and as she writes disparagingly about her failed marriage.
Fascinating because of her ability to write about her feelings in such a detached and analytical manner, and with such apparent candour. It is this analytical detachment, this picking over one’s feelings and thoughts with such attention, that made this book so involving. Not the subject matter, but the style, although the form is inextricably entwined with the content.

I have already read a couple of other autobiographical books by Ernaux, and this undoubtedly increased my enjoyment of this book. I would not recommend it as your first autobiographical work by Ernaux.

I was reading this on a Kindle, and highlighted numerous (over one hundred) passages, it is full of illuminations, even if self evident:
To explain a life, you’d also need to have everything that influenced a person, all that they had read; and even then something remains concealed that cannot be exposed.
I wanted to make this passion a work of art in my life, or rather this affair became a passion because I wanted it to be a work of art (Michel Foucault: the highest good is to make one’s life a work of art).

I cannot place where her sons, Eric and David (about 20, but still living at home) fit in the narrative as they are mentioned in passing from time to time, but not with any emphasis. I suspect authorial reserve is exercised over them, but this grated for me, even allowing for Ernaux’s intense focus on herself, creating the life to make into art.

For reference, she mentions books by Proust, Tolstoy (Anna Karenina unsurprisingly), Mitchell, Grossman, Calvino, Borges, Kundera (disparagingly) and de Beauvoir, all of which I have read.

I received a Netgalley copy of this book, but this review is my honest opinion.

The book is about a 48 year old writer/author living outside of Paris. She meets a young married Russian diplomat, 12 years younger, who she has an affair with.
She becomes totally obsessed with him and is continually in a state of angst, anxiety and jealousy about him. He obviously just enjoys the sexuality of their affair.
When he has to return to Moscow she becomes even more depressed and continually dreams and obsesses about him.
I persevered with this book as I said I would review it but I found the character tedious, annoying and felt like shouting "get a grip woman"

2.5. This was okay, maybe not the best place to enter Ernaux's work. I've had a copy of The Years for... years, but haven't read it yet. I couldn't resist this advance copy for Getting Lost which isn't published till September, though. It is a long-awaited, so I hear, translation of Ernaux's diaries detailing an affair with a Russian man known simply as S. If you are a fan of Ernaux already then perhaps you'd get more from this, 'know' her a little more and so maybe care a little more. I almost gave it three because there are some good lines about writing, about the self, but the whole thing does read like a diary. There is lots of being depressed, crying, it's 200 pages of telling. Ernaux never tried to write this in a beautiful way, I suppose; it's her diary. She prefaces it slightly by saying (warning?) that she changed/removed nothing from the diaries when writing them up. I'm with her on that, I wrote one of my Master's essays on unconscious writing. I appreciate the unabashed honesty of the whole thing.

There is a lot of sex involved and describing her positions, what she did, anal, the like, there is a lot of Proust quoting, Anna Karenina mentions. By the end it becomes more of a dream diary, at which point I began to check how far I was from the end. Some good lines (none of which I can quote because this is an advance copy) but overall felt a little pointless. Ernaux fans will enjoy it more than me. I'm now going to have to backtrack with my reading of her.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4852134492

"This journal will have been a cry of passion and pain from start to finish."

What a courageous act on Ernaux's part to release this uncensored journal ('I neither altered nor removed any part of the original text') charting her inner turmoil, suffering and joy while embarked on a two year love affair with a married Soviet diplomat, the story of which she has also written in her autofictional 'Passion Simple'.

The journal format structurally reinforces the repetitive nature of the - of any? - affair that will always stay as an affair with no development and no future: the waiting, the agonising, the fear that it is over, the jealousy, the rapture, the disappointment, and then the repetition of the whole cycle over and over.

Ernaux is brave in her transparency, and her recognition of the themes even here that are foundations of her more shaped writing: the way time expands and contracts, the role of memory in desire, the connections between love, desire and writing.

On one level, this is an exposure of the self in all its vulnerabilities, in what and who we are when we're unseen; on another, it speaks to the ways in which supposedly 'private' writing (diaries, journals, personal letters) are always themselves sites of self-fashioning and never as innocent as they strive to appear.

Compulsively readable, horribly recognisable, it's fascinating to read this both as the raw material that became 'Passion Simple, and as a piece of women's writing charting interiority and obsession.

Sometimes we don't fall in love with person, but the idea of the person is. Sometimes love is just a wishful thinking

I picked this up hoping that it would be another Eve babitz or Joan didion memoir style- lighthearted, scandalous , and maybe with some juicy celebrity culture info, But in end I was left in shambles. Maybe some shudder too.

Getting lost originally written in French about Annie Ernaux herself, in a relationship with much younger guy, S. It was a hard time; S is a married man, and a Russian diplomat. Every memory, moments I encounters and relations were documented in diary format, with long, beautiful proses. Check out below excerpt:

“The same goes for today, when again I won’t see him. I weep from desire, this all-consuming hunger for him. He represents the most ‘parvenu’ part of myself, the most adolescent too. He’s that ‘man of my youth,’ blond and unrefined (his hands, his square fingernails), who fills me with pleasure. “

What makes this more scandalous is, Annie was divorced woman with 2 children, which was a big deal back in 70s. Oh, and she was in her 50s.

This relationship lasted for almost 2 years. But the relationships goes thru so many details (can’t type here, community guidelines gonna hunt me down) but from the excerpt, you’ll get the gist. It was an ultimate raw writing; all her trauma about the ex husbands, her past poking thru.

Also I’m tempted to to read Simple Passion thanks to this.

Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity.

An interesting read. Not always an easy one, and does on occasion seem a tad repetitive. but the diary form shows the narrative and reveals more internal thoughts.
Unusual, in a good way.

I liked this one to start with but found it very repetitive. A good incite into how toxic relationships can take over your life and effect all parts of it.
I would like to read something else by this author as I really liked the style but just found the diary to be the same thing over and over again.

An emotional roller-coaster wonderfully written & very well translated.

Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC.

A very powerful and gripping story that is difficult to read in some parts but worth sticking with. Not sure if it was an issue with the download or other translation but it wasn't the best copy e.g. blank spaces between the words/paragraphs. I'll definitely look out for a copy when released and give it another go.

This is a first for me by the author and one I enjoyed and would read more of their work. The book cover is eye-catching and appealing and would spark my interest if in a bookshop. Thank you very much to the author, publisher and Netgalley for this ARC.

Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux, wonderfully translated by Alison L. Strayer, is the diary of an affair which Ernaux has used for her fiction previously, with Simple Passion, but here is told in all its unfiltered, messy, life-altering and yet entirely inconsequential way.

As to be expected, Ernaux's prose in these diary entries is spare, pared down, often naval-gazing in its self-interrogation. The affair with this younger man runs through the fag end days of the 1980s as the world shifts around them, and in which I suspect both parties found a little stabilisation through their actions.

How much you will enjoy this work depends upon how much sympathy you have for both parties - both as guilty in their actions as each other - and how much you can tolerate this introspective prose.

It is a great document of Ernaux and her time without wanting to be anything more.

Thank you to the publishers and Netgalley for the ARC.