Simple Passion

"The triumph of Ms Ernaux's approach… is to cherish commonplace emotions while elevating the banal expression of them … A monument to passions that defy simple explanations.”  =  The New York Times Book Review

Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her 2-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference.

“All this—the suffering and anxiety of waiting, the brief soulagement of lovemaking, the lethargy and fatigue that follow, the renewal of desire, the little indignities and abjections of both obsession and abandonment—Ernaux tells with calm, almost tranquillized matter-of-factness [that] feels like determination, truth to self, clarity of purpose.”  -   The Washington Post

With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it.