In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, she attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married man where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, Ernaux seeks the truth behind an existence lived, for a time, entirely for someone else.
In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, she attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married man where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, Ernaux seeks the truth behind an existence lived, for a time, entirely for someone else.
Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
‘Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original
and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in
her world for months.’
— Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood
‘The triumph of Ernaux’s approach ... is to cherish commonplace
emotions while elevating the banal expression of them.... A
monument to passions that defy simple explanations.’
— New York Times
‘I devoured – not once, but twice – Fitzcarraldo’s new English
edition of Simple Passion, in which the great Annie Ernaux
describes the suspended animation of a love affair with a man who
is not free. Every paragraph, every word, brought me closer to a
state of purest yearning.’
— Rachel Cooke, Observer
‘What mesmerizes here, as elsewhere in Ernaux’s oeuvre, is the
interplay between the solipsistic intensity of the material and its
documentary, disinterested, almost egoless presentation.
Reminiscent of the poet Denise Riley’s Time
Lived, Without its Flow, a study of how grief mangles
chronology, Simple Passion is a riveting investigation,
in a less tragic key, into what happens to one’s experience of time
in the throes of romantic obsession.’
— Lola Seaton, New Statesman
‘All this – the suffering and anxiety of waiting, the brief
soulagement of lovemaking, the lethargy and fatigue that follow,
the renewal of desire, the little indignities and abjections of
both obsession and abandonment – Ernaux tells with calm, almost
tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination,
truth to self, clarity of purpose.’
— Washington Post
‘Simple Passion ... delivers a heart-rending story of a
scorching love affair, down to the tiny details, in just 48 pages.
It’s a little masterpiece.’
— Orna Mulcahy, The Gloss
‘A stunning story, despite its detachment and the careful
exclusions of any excess, that pulsates with the very passion
Ernaux so truthfully describes.... Small, but abundantly wise.’
— Kirkus
‘A work of lyrical precision and diamond-hard clarity.’
— New Yorker
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