s.penkevich's Reviews > Simple Passion

‘We were burning up a capital of desire. What we gained in physical intensity we lost in time.’

It is with a staggering brilliance and sublime prose that Annie Ernaux is able to turn on a firehose of passion into her short works, leaving the reader overcome with emotion and flipping pages with the same feverish intensity as Ernaux describes herself in her recollections of the past. Simple Passion is a deceptively simple novel at 80pgs, but Ernaux manages to pack a seemingly endless flow of emotion into this story about an affair while also using it as a platform to discuss autobiographical fiction. As always, Ernaux harnesses a directness with words that pulls a fierce sense of passion with them, beautiful translated into English here by Tanya Leslie. ‘All I have done,’ she writes, ‘is translate into words…the way in which his existence has affected my life’ and she does so in a way that will certainly affect the reader and plant you directly into an understanding of her mind and manners during this period of time. Quick, gorgeous, and bursting with Ernaux’s enthusiasm and insights, Simple Passion is another reminder that even winning the Nobel Prize might not be enough praise for what she deserves.

‘[W]hen I began to write, I wanted to stay in that age of passion, when all my actions…were channeled towards one person.’

It is a simple enough story, covering the year of an affair with a married man—a Russian diplomat working in Paris and bears a ‘slight resemblance’ to a young Alain Delon—and a few reflections after it comes to an end. Yet, Ernaux manages to make it feel like it is a far reaching importance in a way that captures how this affair captured her entire being during the time. She says about the duration of the affair that ‘quite often I felt I was living out this passion in the same way I would have written a book: the same determination to get every single scene right, the same minute attention to detail,’ which makes sense to then which to capture the story and retell it in a way she hopes that ‘these pages will always mean something to me, to others too maybe.’ As with many Ernaux books, she separates from the idea of being purely memoir and this book is categorized by the publisher as fiction, though for those who are interested, her real, unfiltered diary entries from the time of this affair are published as Getting Lost, which appeared in English translation earlier this year.

‘I could experience only absence or presence.’

One this that comes across clearly in her works is that she is someone that feels emotion with her whole heart, body and soul. Simple Passion recounts, well, incredible passion and being ‘entirely at the mercy’ of these feelings. This full-being intensity is reflected as well in The Possession where she is completely driven by her obsessions, though her it is with a former lover’s new partner (not the same affair though as in this book). ‘I do not wish to explain my passion,’ she tells us, ‘that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify—I just want to describe it.’ Of the time during the affair she tells us ‘I behaved in an artificial manner,’ and ‘the only actions involving willpower, desire, and what I take to be human intelligence...were all related to this man.’ Anything not directly part of her ‘growing obsession’ she sees as something that is merely ‘a means of filling in time between two meetings.’ Anyone who has felt the intensity of love, especially young love, will likely be stirred by these feelings no matter how seemingly foolish, just as she realizes in this time how empathetic and empowered she is by all the stories of other women so immersed in their obsessions of love. She pushes aside anything that ‘prevented me from luxuriating in the sensations and fantasies of my own passion.’ In effect, he was her entire being during this period.

‘I measured time differently, with all my body.’

The book recounts her observations of herself during the time as well as those of him, though we actually learn very little about him and much more about how she felt because of him. We know he is married, he likes to drink, he is only ever referred to as ‘A’, and that there is a bit of a language barrier, but for the latter she enjoys it as it gives her, upfront, ‘the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.’ I enjoy the way Ernaux describes how even things like a mark on the carpet from a food accident are pleasing because it is a reminder of time spent with him. This is something most of us do, attach memories to mementos, and I find that eventually these objects become neither the object or the memory, but an interesting blend that is both but could no longer have meaning without the other. Her method of detailing the emotional resonance from events gives a more heartfelt impact than if she had focused on detailing the events instead.

During the later parts of the affair, we see Ernaux grappling with the knowledge of time passing, memories and feelings fading, and how we always try and inevitably fail to swim upstream.He leaves, inevitable, back for Russia and we find the the deluge of emotions has now dried up into a somber state of insomnia and lacking a sense of purpose. Where once absence meant longing for the next meeting, now it merely means absence without a presence to come. I found it particularly moving when she says that ‘the partly erased frescoes in Santa Croce moved me because of my story, which would come to resemble them one day—fading fragments in his memory and in mine.’ After a relationship ends sadly, often the idea that you’ll get over it is almost more painful, because at least you have the sadness attached to memories to keep you in that moment. The fading seems like a betrayal.

‘Living in passion or writing: in each case one’s perception of time is fundamentally different.’

‘Throughout this period, all my thoughts and all my actions involved the repetition of history,' Ernaux writes, 'I wanted to turn the present back into the past, opening on to happiness.’ When revisiting places does not trigger this, she turns to writing, something that figures as a life saving or life giving action in many of her works. This is also a favorite aspect of her books for me. Simple Passion tackles head on her fears of ‘people’s judgment and the “normal” values of society’ that can occur after publication, which she mostly dismisses in many others. But here she stresses over ‘having to answer questions such as “Is it an autobiography?” and having to justify this or that,’ and how this fear keeps many stories from people told. This is territory I’ve found Jeanette Winterson handles with expertise, insisting that even the books delving deeply into biographical details are simply fiction and that ‘Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements.’ Ernaux reaches her own conclusion tha stories must be told and this idea which is highly indicative of her work:

‘It occurred to me that writing should also aim for that—the impression conveyed by sexual intercourse, a feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.’

So this is a great line, right? As time passes, she finds ‘the world is beginning to mean something again outside A’ but the pages of this book are a more permanent catalog of the passions and desires of their time together. She says they last with more emotion than, say, a bathrobe he once used she would cling to even once his scent has left, and through her fiction she is hope able to even ‘save the bathrobe from oblivion.’ It is a beautiful sentiment. What is interesting is that she says these are the fictional, polished accounts, but her writing manages to retain a rawness that strikes straight to the heart.

‘It is a mistake therefore to compare someone writing about his own life to an exhibitionist, since the latter has only one desire: to show himself and to be seen at the same time.’

Annie Ernaux is an absolute gem and I am once again blown away by how much power she can pack into these short snacks of remembrance. In such a little space she packs a whole cosmos of feeling, from passion to pain, and bestows it so elegantly and bravely upon the reader. While I found this one slightly less impactful than the previous ones I've read, Happening likely being the most, it was still a deeply emotive and moving experience. Through her reflections, she is able to learn more about herself and she passes that along to us as a lesson as well. Namely she learned people are capable of ‘ anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them,’ and that possibility is part of what makes fiction so essential. But most importantly she learned that, to add to all her ideas of what the word luxury means ‘is also being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman.’ I’d like to add another meaning, and that luxury is being able to spend time in the brilliant mind of authors like Ernaux.

5/5

‘Now I was only time flowing through myself.’