Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux (tr. Alison L. Strayer)
In her slim memoir Simple Passion, Annie Ernaux recounts her love affair with a younger, married man from the USSR, giving a fleeting insight into the agony and ecstasy, the despair and torturous hope the liaison aroused within her. In this near-perfect book, Ernaux details the all-consuming desire she felt and the humiliations she suffered at the hands of the emotional and physical entrapment. But she also kept a diary during the affair itself (which was published in French years after the fact), and these journal entries are now released in English as Getting Lost.
Unlike Simple Passion, there is an immediacy to Ernaux’s diary that is enthralling and oh-so human. Her other memoirs, though at times unnervingly frank and highly personal, are sparer and more considered. Through her journal entries, we experience her vacillating emotions in real time, as it were, watching on as her memories of incidents that occurred mere pages ago are distorted and deformed through the lens of her all-encompassing emotional state. In her introduction to Getting Lost, Ernaux herself ponders the distinction between the two works: “I perceived there was a ‘truth’ in those pages that different from the one to be found in Simple Passion — something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.”
Ernaux’s writing, in Alison L. Strayer’s accomplished translation, is brazen and candid. Despite the cyclical, repetitive nature of events — the ecstasy of seeing her lover again, the dread of his leaving, the feelings of melancholy after he has departed, the agony of waiting and hoping for his call, repeated ad infinitum — the writing is urgent and gripping, perhaps because it is dealing in such emotional extremes.
Interspersed among the details of her mental state are some wonderful reflections on writing. “I am no longer sure that freedom exists in writing. I even wonder if writing isn’t the domain of greatest alienation, in which the past and the horror of lived experience return. But on the other hand, the result, a book, can function as a means of freedom for others.” In her mind, writing and the experience of pleasure are juxtaposed, seen as analogous but simultaneously almost polar opposites. While she is in the throes of her wild romance she struggles to write anything at all, but as she watches those moments of pleasure retreat into the ever more distant past, she feels compelled once again to put pen to paper and bare her soul in a different way.
Though perhaps not the best place to start with Ernaux, Getting Lost is a must-read for anyone wishing to delve further into her work. She is a writer of rare calibre, a woman who writes with such honesty and, above all, humanity, as to render her work irresistible.
Getting Lost is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, 21st September 2022