Simple Passion

In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, she attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married man where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, Ernaux seeks the truth behind an existence lived, for a time, entirely for someone else.

Review:

'Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.'
- Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood

'The triumph of Ernaux's approach ... is to cherish commonplace emotions while elevating the banal expression of them.... A monument to passions that defy simple explanations.'
- New York Times

'I devoured - not once, but twice - Fitzcarraldo's new English edition of Simple Passion, in which the great Annie Ernaux describes the suspended animation of a love affair with a man who is not free. Every paragraph, every word, brought me closer to a state of purest yearning.'
- Rachel Cooke, Observer

'What mesmerizes here, as elsewhere in Ernaux's oeuvre, is the interplay between the solipsistic intensity of the material and its documentary, disinterested, almost egoless presentation. Reminiscent of the poet Denise Riley's Time Lived, Without its Flow, a study of how grief mangles chronology, Simple Passion is a riveting investigation, in a less tragic key, into what happens to one's experience of time in the throes of romantic obsession.'
- Lola Seaton, New Statesman

'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.'
- Washington Post

'Simple Passion ... delivers a heart-rending story of a scorching love affair, down to the tiny details, in just 48 pages. It's a little masterpiece.'
- Orna Mulcahy, The Gloss

'A stunning story, despite its detachment and the careful exclusions of any excess, that pulsates with the very passion Ernaux so truthfully describes.... Small, but abundantly wise.'
- Kirkus

'A work of lyrical precision and diamond-hard clarity.'