Simple Passion

It was all infinite emptiness, except when we were together making love.

This is an extremely short novella. Rather a longer story. It documents this passionate love affair Annie Ernaux engaged in with a married man from the perspective of the madness of desire and passion and the extent to which it drives and changes a human being.

The two year long entanglement is marked by consumption of her entire being by her desire for the man referred to as ‘A’. Her life shifts - she lives from one meeting with him to the next. Things have meaning only in association to him and she only exists beyond the meetings to find him in everyday objects and interaction. This attachment is marked by anxiety over knowledge of its inevitable and sudden show more end, and after the end, with retroactive shame over the immorality of her passion.

Annie Ernaux, I see her as more of an archivist - a term she used to identify herself with in “A Woman's Story” - in the sense that her works go beyond memoirs or accounts of her life, she chronicles her experiences with this underlying but ubiquitous purpose of making others feel seen and also to gain clarity over her own experience. This is a brave endeavour, and every time I read her I am continuously in awe of this detached clarity she has over her life, over her experiences and over her choices that I wish to possibly gain over my own.

She manages to write in first person about herself yet create a distance - in a way reducing the experiencing to that of the narrator and assigning herself the role of a chronicler. This way, she reproduces her experiences in a work that stands on its own beyond her. The prose is restrained but the portrait painted is unrestrained - of a human driven by obsessive desire as reason, logic, morality is suspended along with their own self-preservation highlighting the emptinesswhich the consumption of their being by the passion leads to. show less

I believe Erneaux accomplished exactly what she wished to accomplish. The writing is sublime, the honesty bracing, and I was repelled. She supposes the purpose of her writing is her way of finding if others share her experiences and feelings. Maybe they do. What she discusses only makes me think of a relationship I had from ages 13-18. I was a child, defining myself through the discovery of my sexuality, sexual power, and defining my worth by the opinion of others. The return to that feeling was unwelcome, but the intensity of that reconnection with that time speaks of Ernaux's accomplishment here.

Note: Ernaux mentions a film that coincidentally made me feel the same as this book did. That film, In the Realm of the Senses, is so show more clearly related to this book. If you haven't seen it, I assure you it does not end well. If you have seen the film and it spoke to you, I think you will want to read this. show less

Before starting this book, I read a couple of reviews recommending it to be read all at once, which isn't a difficult task, considering that it is less than 50 pages. Having followed that advice, I now understand why it was important - this book is a gut punch of raw emotions, and must all be absorbed in one take for full effect.

What keeps this book from being a collection of generic rants (it gets very close at some points) is the fact that Annie Ernaux manages to convince the reader that the sheer intensity of the narrator's desires is unprecedented. The powerful prose has the ability to make some of the reflections of the narrator relatable for the reader, and one can convincingly look for closure to their own personal situations show more from the statements made in the book.

I have always been interested in seeing seemingly abstract thoughts and emotions being put to words, because I sometimes need assurance that there is a thought process behind our actions as humans, and that there is less spontaneity than we're lead to believe. The main reason to be drawn towards Simple Passion is because it seems to do so quite effortlessly. show less

i looooooooooove Annie Ernaux's writing style. she has a way to make the reader understand her feelings, if not agree with them. "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." i mean come on.. what a statement! it is difficult not to emerge from this book feeling all the intimacy of it. Annie Ernaux is a writer who brings things down to the most vulnerable, to the concrete and particular. every detail, brings us into a rare and almost intolerable sense of privacy. this whole book is like overhearing a confession from somebody at another table

Uma coisa que pensamos ao ler Paixão Simples da Annie Ernaux para além de ser um dos retratos mais honestos deste vírus chamado Paixão é o quanto o Lacan teria gostado desse livro. Se ele já era maluco pela Duras e sua poética do desejo, imagino que Paixão Simples lhe renderia até uma conferência. E sim, é bom nesse nível.

a powerful little novel in which Ernaux bares her soul and shares a period of romantic obsession that is a bit disturbing due to seeing elements of one's own past.

I admire the brazen artfulness of this book which starts with an epigraph from Barthes and takes what might harshly be described as a banal series of episodes and somehow manages to transform into something more compelling. It’s not, for me, truly alchemical though.

PS There are some truly hilarious reading group discussion notes and questions for this book available. Try the ones at Ernaux’s US publishers Seven Stories Press, for example, who clearly don’t want readers to feel that earnestness should be undersold.