Annie Ernaux is a French writer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. I already read 4 of her many books and my favorite is I Remain in Darkness: documentation since her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer, witnessing her gradual decline and experiencing loss. It was honest and heart-breaking, it reminds me about the shortness of life.
Most of her books are autobiographical. Ernaux was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements, and collective restraints of personal memory.
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Simple Passion by Annie Ernaux is a documentation of her heart-wrenching love affair with a married man. It was raw and painful to read. Her intense yearning, her irrational obsession, her silent pain, and her desire. She bravely shares something so scandalous to the world, something of a taboo, usually hidden from the public. We always see the third person in marriage as evil, forgetting that they are flawed humans as well. Ernaux wrote as the third person in a relationship.
Some excerpts :
I had no future other than the telephone call fixing our next appointment. I would try to leave the house as little as possible except for professional reasons (naturally he knew my working hours), forever fearing that he might call during my absence. I would also avoid using the vacuum cleaner or the hairdryer as they would have prevented me from hearing the sound of the telephone. Every time it rang, I was consumed with a hope that only lasted the time it took me slowly to pick up the receiver and say hello. When I realised it wasn’t him, I felt so utterly dejected that I began to loath the person who was on the line. As soon as I heard A’s voice, my long, painful wait, invariably tinged with jealousy, dissipated so quickly that I felt I had been mad and had suddenly become sane again. I was struck by the insignificance of that voice and the exaggerated importance it had taken in my life.I experienced pleasure like a future pain.
Quite often I would write down on a sheet of paper the date, the time, and “he’s going to come,” along with other sentences, fears—that he might not come, that he might not feel the same desire for me.”
Desire is a challenging muse. It is intense and painful, but it is inspiring and it is full of life, of emotions. It tangles up in crazy knots that seem impossible to be free from. I have this phase of my life when I write things I can’t really write anymore, this muse, came from a special place.
Anyone who has felt the intensity of such love could relate, and it seems foolish now when we look back, we realized how pathetic we may sound, how weak, how painful, how stupid, how utterly completely irrational. But we are not fully governed by our rational mind, we are as human as we are. It is a weak point that I do not wish on anyone, except for writers I guess, because we needed to share this pain with the world, to hold hands with those who needed it.
From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.
Thanks to him, I was able to approach the frontier separating me from others, to the extent of actually believing that I could sometimes cross over it.
He had said, “You won’t write a book about me.” But I haven’t written a book about him, neither have I written a book about myself. All I have done is translate into words—words he will probably never read; they are not intended for him—the way in which his existence has affected my life. An offering of a sort, bequeathed to others.
She wrote it not for the man that she loved, but for herself, for the sake of healing, of letting go, to reflect on things and for that I salute her because I needed to read that.
I wish I could write something that is raw and shares it with the world.
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