![]() 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. 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. 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. “ In this entrancing work, French writer Ernaux (The Years) relives the passionate yet devastating memories of a whirlwind affair through her own diary entries. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.Ĭlick here to read an excerpt in The Paris Review ![]() Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. ![]() When he is gone and the desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.” She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered. Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat.
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