Infinite Books

In 1988 Annie Ernaux was 48 years old, living on the outskirts of Paris, and consumed by a love affair with a 36-year-old Russian diplomat based in Paris. She chronicled the next year and a half in her diary, the belated translation of which has just been published. Annie Ernaux is now eighty-four and the 2022 Noble Prize winner.

Reading this book, one of my first thoughts was – what a lucky man that Russian guy was! He’s now immortalized in beautiful literature forever. Annie Ernaux describes him as tall and slender, with dark brown hair and green eyes. He’s simply S., who calls her from a public phone and comes whenever he has time after work. He’s married to Masha, a woman who, as Ernaux says, is the complete opposite of Annie. S. is not an intellectual; he likes fast cars, simple TV programs, and talks about Brezhnev, but he probably misses Stalin. He also drinks too much and makes love without taking his socks off… the list of his shortcomings is longer, but I’ll stop here.

Despite all this, Annie is consumed by desire and spends her days waiting for his calls. She precisely describes her longing, jealousy, and lovemaking. She starts learning Russian and reads Anna Karenina, comparing herself to Anna and her lover to Vronsky. Russian culture embodied in S. fascinates her as exotic and mysterious. Interestingly, the fascination between France and Russia is well documented in history, starting with Peter the Great and Louis XIV. Closer to our times, the followers of Russian-French romances may remember the love story of an iconic Russian poet Vladimir Vysotsky and a French actress, Marina Vlady.

This short book is a brilliant testament to the power of attraction and desire and how much it can take control over one’s life. The language of Ernaux’s diary is almost raw, and every single emotion stands out as if being exposed. In feverish but also simple prose, Ernaux writes about her past relationships, the death of her mother, and her own abortion. All of it manifests in her dreams, which she describes in detail. This diary was written when she couldn’t write anything except short articles for magazines. She also avoided attending social events and basically submerged herself in this love affair, even though she realized that, for many reasons, the relationship had no future. In fear of abandonment, she clung to her fleeting happiness.

Now it’s 2023. I don’t see thirteen years of age difference as strange, and both women and men talk about their sexuality openly. Reading “Getting lost” is reading a diary of different times. The political situation is also completely different. Still, desire, lust, loneliness, and fear of death are part of our human experience. Annie Ernaux writes about herself, but she’s writing about all of us simultaneously. And this is beautiful literature.

GETTING LOST, Annie Ernaux, Seven Stories Press, 2022