Every year there is excited debate about what author will be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and this year one of the top contenders that readers were speculating about was Annie Ernaux. Since I had a fairly free morning and while I was waiting for the prize announcement to be made, I thought I'd get to reading the most recent book to be translated by this author whose work I fell in love with starting with “The Years”. It's very short – just under 50 pages! And it centres around the subject of a married man that the author/narrator had an affair with for a couple of years. It's an all-consuming passion which takes over her life for this period of time. Her focus is not on the details or moral drama of the affair, but the impact passion has upon an individual: “I do not wish to explain my passion – that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify – but simply to describe it.” In doing so, she illuminates how we can become completely entangled in heated passion in a way that defies all logic and reason. Ernaux uses her characteristically rigorous sense of self enquiry to raise larger questions about the nature of desire, imagination, time and memory.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Ernaux's writing is the openness of her narrative to take shape in the way which will best convey the meaning and heart of her subject matter. She describes how: “I felt I was living out my passion in the manner of a novel, but now I am not sure in which style I am writing about it, whether in the style of a testimony, or possibly even the sort of confidence that can be found in women's magazines, maybe a manifesto or a statement, or perhaps a critical commentary.” This book defies genre or any conventional form. Yet, its construction feels perfectly suited to what she wants to say and there's a masterful precision to her ideas. If most writers were to do this and discuss the book's construction so openly within the text it would feel intrusively self conscious, but with Ernaux it feels like a sincere and conscientious way to explore the subject matter. The book even moves from the past to the present tense because she realises that she's gradually being released from the grip that passion has on her which traps her in memories of her lover. At the beginning she's outside of the flow of everyday life, but by the end she's rejoined the stream of time and can reside again in the present.
It's curious how feverish passion causes us to idealize the lover. In the midst of this the lover can feel like the greatest person in the world, but afterwards we can see all too clearly that individual's flaws. Ernaux is careful not to reveal many details about the lover in order to respect his privacy and because his identity really isn't the subject of this book. We do know that he comes from a country outside France and that he doesn't even speak French that well. The fact that the narrator can't communicate that clearly with him almost seems to add to the way he's fashioned into an ideal and how nothing about their relationship is clear except the sexual desire between them: “I would only ever be certain of one thing: his desire or lack of desire. The only undeniable truth could be glimpsed by looking at his penis.” However, rather than recounting the details of their encounters, Ernaux focuses instead on the excruciating interim periods between their meetings and the force with which this passion controls her life.
This is most certainly not a saccharine or nostalgic account of a love affair. Ernaux describes passion as a destructive force which leads to pernicious thoughts and grievous actions. Not only does the passion annihilate any other pleasure she has in her life, but she longs for self destruction to reclaim that sense of closeness: “One night the thought of getting myself screened for AIDS occurred to me: 'At least he would have left me that.'” Equally disturbing is her compulsion to go “to the place where I had a clandestine abortion twenty years ago... As if hoping that this past trauma would cancel my present grief.” It was quite a shock to suddenly be taken back to the incident and physical location described in Ernaux's book “Happening”. Yet, it doesn't feel like Ernaux is justifying or judging the simultaneously exhilarating and poisonous effect that passion has upon a person's life. Rather, this text functions as a kind of testament which can be a touchstone for others who have felt such passion. The fact that Ernaux ultimately judges this passion to be “meaningless” adds to the persistent mystery of why it is a force that so feverishly grips our lives.
When I finished reading this book I went online to see that Ernaux has not won the Nobel Prize this year (the award went to the great Tanzanian novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah), but I hope one day she'll receive this honour.
