WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
2022 NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
The diary of one of France's most important, award-winning writers
during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a
Russian diplomat.
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. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but
here her writing is immediate, unfiltered.
In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons,
living outside of Paris and nearing fifty. 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. When he is gone and the
desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death.
Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her
writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. 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.
