Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux: book review
The shock I had when I saw Goodreads classifies this as fiction. I'd read a bit of Exteriors for a class in an excerpt, and I considered Ernaux a nonfiction writer, a literary nonfiction writer. Not even really auto fiction because it feels like she liberally inserts herself factually into the narratives that are pulled unaltered from her life. This affair really happened... I'd gotten into this book hearing it talked about by one of my classmates so much that I got curious, and that was a great way to sink in. A slight idea that the prose would be good from my previous skim and then an effusive reverence for the writer as the only precursors. Usually, I'll give you a summary of the book before we get started, but I'm not sure how to do that here except to say this is a slim volume about her affair with the married man. Nothing in the summary speaks to what makes it compelling, though. So, instead, I'm going to give you two quotes I really liked and then talk about it. Overall: 5
"On the plane, on the way back, I reflected that I had traveled to Denmark simply to send a postcard to a man." p. 48
"Sometimes, I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same thing or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal." p. 50
Annie Ernaux is a beautifully direct writer adept at laying bare the simple, annoying, stark truths of being a person. In Exteriors, this is through her portraits from the outside of people she encountered in her French suburb and on the train. In Simple Passion, this is turned in on an affair she has with a married man and an archeological excavation of her own obsession and infatuation. The affair, both who A is and whether he'll exist in her life in the future, is not the point. For once, we're not following a character (again, I feel awkward in my footing on how to talk about this book and where it sits in category) who is harboring a hope that the affair will become lasting or something more than it is will bloom. We're not meant to find it compelling. We are not reading an account of an affair for the affair or a sense of romance but instead for the way Ernaux renders this animating force of infatuation and how a crush seeps into your bones, changes your rhythms. There's a catharsis of seeing these maladaptive, embarrassing behaviors no one wants to acknowledge or discuss rendered on the page because they are undeniably real.
Ernaux is unselfconscious about her silly behaviors, consumed thoughts, or the fact that she is fucking a married man. It's the frankness that makes the piece work, that makes the reader comfortable enough to see themselves in the slim volume. There's whip fast pacing that helps you fly through the book, an unspooling of uncontainable feelings that then gets a coda of reflection.
This is the strength across Ernaux's works that I've read (admittedly little but still) where she knows just where to insert herself as the author to analyze from a remove and state her aims at the time and note where they fall short or into logical fallacies. The story unfolds in the moment and then is considered from hindsight without interrupting the rendering of the memory. She assumes multiple roles in a small space in a way that elevates the book.
Simple Passion is the perfect articulation of what it feels like to be deeply infatuated, to make bad, illogical choices that keep you alive for reasons that go far beyond any singular or particular man.
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