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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Getting Lost is the diary kept by Annie Ernaux during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, an attaché to the Soviet embassy in Paris. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate and unfiltered. In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living in the suburbs of Paris and nearing fifty. Her lover escapes the city to see her there and Ernaux seems to survive only in expectation of these encounters. She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives merely to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the moment of desire has faded, she feels that she is a step closer to death. Lauded for her spare prose, Ernaux here removes all artifice, her writing pared down to its most naked and vulnerable. Translated brilliantly for the first time by Alison L. Strayer, Getting Lost is a haunting record of a woman in the grips of love, desire and despair.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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3Praise for Simple Passion
‘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.’
— Caryn James, New York Times
‘A work of lyrical precision and diamond-hard clarity.’
— New Yorker
‘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.’
— Alan Jenkins, Washington Post
‘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 mesmerises 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
4Praise for A Girl’s Story
‘A profound and beautiful examination of the impenetrable wall that time erects between the self we are, and the selves we once were. I know of no other book that so vividly illustrates the frustrations and the temptations of that barrier, and our heartache and longing in trying to breach it. 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 Pure Colour
‘Annie Ernaux writes memoir with such generosity and vulnerable power that I find it difficult to separate my own memories from hers long after I’ve finished reading. In A Girl’s Story she detangles an adolescence rife with desire and shame, an era of both internal and external debasement. Ernaux wisely ventures into the gray areas of her memories; she doesn’t attempt to transcend their power, nor to even “understand” them, but to press them firmly into this diamond of a book.’
— Catherine Lacey, author of Pew
‘Ernaux is an unusual memoirist: she distrusts her memory… Ernaux does not so much reveal the past – she does not pretend to have any authoritative access to it – as unpack it.’
— Madeleine Schwartz, New Yorker
‘Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation.’
— Margaret Drabble, New Statesman
‘Another deeply felt, fearlessly honest exploration of female desire, shame, and intellectual passion from the incomparable Annie Ernaux.’
— Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend
5Praise for A Man’s Place
‘A lesser writer would turn these experiences into misery memoirs, but Ernaux does not ask for our pity – or our admiration. It’s clear from the start that she doesn’t much care whether we like her or not, because she has no interest in herself as an individual entity. She is an emblematic daughter of emblematic French parents, part of an inevitable historical process, which includes breaking away. Her interest is in examining the breakage… Ernaux is the betrayer and her father the betrayed: this is the narrative undertow that makes A Man’s Place so lacerating.’
— Frances Wilson, Telegraph
‘Not simply a short biography of man manacled to class assumptions, this is also, ironically, an exercise in the art of unsentimental writing… The biography is also self-reflexive in its inquiry and suggests the question: what does it mean to contain a life within a number of pages?’
— Mia Colleran, Irish Times
‘Ernaux understands that writing about her parents is a form of betrayal. That she writes about their struggle to understand the middle-class literary world into which she has moved makes that betrayal all the more painful. But still she does it – and it is thrilling to read Ernaux working out, word by word, what she deems appropriate to include in each text. In being willing to show her discomfort, her disdain and her honest, careful consideration of the dilemmas of writing about real, lived lives, Ernaux has struck upon a bold new way to write memoir.’
— Ellen Pierson-Hagger, New Statesman6
GETTING LOST
ANNIE ERNAUX
Translated by ALISON L. STRAYER
9
Voglio vivere una favola. (I want to live a fable)
Anonymous inscription on the steps of the Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence
Contents
11On 16 Nov., 1989, I phoned the Soviet embassy in Paris and asked to speak to Mr S. The switchboard operator did not reply. After a long silence, a woman’s voice said: ‘You know, Mr S returned to Moscow yesterday.’ I immediately hung up. I felt as if I’d heard this sentence before, over the phone. The words were not the same but they had the same meaning, the same weight of horror, and were just as impossible to believe. Later, I remembered the announcement of my mother’s death, three and a half years earlier, how the nurse at the hospital had said: ‘Your mother passed away this morning after breakfast.’
The Berlin Wall had fallen several days before. The Soviet regimes established in Europe were toppling one after the other. The man who had just returned to Moscow was a faithful servant of the USSR, a Russian diplomat posted in Paris.
I had met him the previous year on a writers’ junket to Moscow, Tbilisi, and Leningrad, a voyage he had been assigned to accompany. We had spent the last night together, in Leningrad. After returning to France, we continued to see each other. The ritual was invariable. He would ring to ask if he could come around to see me in the afternoon or evening, or, more rarely, a day or two later. He would arrive and stay just a few hours, which we spent making love. Then he left, and I would live in wait for his next call.
He was thirty-five. His wife worked as his secretary at the embassy. His trajectory, which I pieced together over the course of our meetings, was typical of a young apparatchik: membership in the Komsomol and then in the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), time spent in Cuba. He spoke French quickly, with a strong accent. Though outwardly a partisan of Gorbachev and perestroika, when he’d had a drink, he mourned the time 12of Brezhnev and made no secret of his veneration of Stalin.
I never knew anything about his activities, which, officially, were related to culture. Today, I am amazed that I did not ask more questions. Nor will I ever know what I meant to him. His desire for me was the only thing I was sure of. He was, in every sense of the word, the shadow lover.
During this period, I wrote nothing but the articles which I was asked to do for magazines. The only place where I truly wrote was in the journal I had kept, on and off, since adolescence. It was a way of enduring the wait until we saw each other again, of heightening the pleasure by recording the words and acts of passion. Most of all, it was a way to save life, to save from nothingness the thing that most resembles it.
After he left France, I started to write a book about this passion which had swept through me and continued to live inside me. I worked on the book sporadically, finished it in 1991, and published it in 1992 as Simple Passion.
In the spring of 1999, I travelled to Russia again. I had not been back since my trip in 1988. I did not see S, but this made no difference to me. In Leningrad, which had become Saint Petersburg again, I could not recall the name of the hotel where I had spent the night with him. During the visit, the only trace that remained of this passion was my knowledge of a few words of Russian. Exhaustingly, and in spite of myself, I continually tried to decipher the Cyrillic script on signs and billboards. It surprised me that I knew those words, that alphabet. The man for whom I had learned them had ceased to exist in me, and I no longer cared whether he was alive or dead.
In January or February 2000, I started to reread my journals from the year of my passionate affair with S. It 13had been five years since I had opened them. (For reasons that need not be specified here, they had been stored in a place that made them unavailable to me.) I perceived there was a ‘truth’ in those pages that differed from the one to be found in Simple Passion – something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation. I thought that this, too, should be brought to light.
I neither altered nor removed any part of the original text while typing it into the computer. For me, words set down on paper to capture the thoughts and sensations of a given moment are as irreversible as time – are time itself. I simply used initials when expressing a judgment that I felt could harm the person to whom they referred, and also to designate the object of my passion, S. Not that I believe that in doing so, I could protect his identity – a vain illusion, if there ever was one – but because the de-realizing effect of the initial seemed consistent with what this man was to me: the embodiment of the absolute, of something which instils a nameless terror.
The outside world is almost totally absent from these pages. To this day, I continue to feel it was more important to record daily thoughts and actions, the things which constitute the novel of life that a love affair is (details from the socks he did not remove while making love to his desire to die at the wheel of his car), rather than the current events of the period, which can always be checked in archives.
I am conscious that I am publishing this journal because of an inner imperative, without concern for how S might feel. He could rightly judge it an abuse of literary power, or even a betrayal. I could understand if he defends himself with laughter or disdain: ‘I only saw her to get my rocks off.’ But I would rather that he accept (even if he doesn’t understand) that for months, without knowing 14it, he embodied the principle, wondrous and terrifying, of desire, of death and writing.
Autumn 2000
1988
September Tuesday 27
S… the beauty of it all: the very same desires, the same actions as at other times in the past, in ’58 and ’63, and with P. The same drowsiness, even torpor. Three scenes stand out. That evening (Sunday) in his room, as we sat close to each other, touching, saying nothing, willing and eager for what would follow, which still depended on me. His hand passed close to my legs, stretched out in front of me, and brushed them each time he put his cigarette ash in the container on the floor. In front of everyone. We talked as if nothing were going on. Then the others leave (Marie R, Irène, RVP) but F hangs back, waiting to leave with me. I know that if I leave S’s room now, I won’t have the strength to return. Then everything’s a blur. F is outside the room, or almost, the door is open, and it seems to me that S and I throw ourselves at each other. Then the door is closed (by whom?) and we are just inside, in the entry hall. My back, pressed against the wall, switches the light off and on. I have to move aside. I drop my raincoat, handbag, suit jacket. S turns off the light. The night begins, which I experience with absolute intensity (along with the desire never to see him again, as with other men in the past).
The second moment, Monday afternoon. When I’ve finished packing my case, he knocks at the door to my room. We caress each other in the doorway. He wants me so much that I kneel down and lingeringly make him come with my mouth. He is silent, then only murmurs my name like a litany, with his Russian accent. My back 16pressed against the wall – darkness (he doesn’t want the lights on) – communion.
The third moment is on the sleeper train to Moscow. We kiss at the back of the carriage, my head next to a fire extinguisher (which I only identify later). All this happened in Leningrad.
I feel no sense of caution or restraint, nor do I have any doubts, finally. Something has come full circle. I commit the same errors as in the past but they are no longer errors. There is only beauty, passion, desire.
Since my flight home yesterday, I have tried to reconstruct events, but they tend to elude me, as if something had happened outside my consciousness. All I am sure of is that on Saturday, in Zagorsk, as we visit the Treasures in the monastery, slippers on our feet, he takes me by the waist for a few seconds, and I know right away that I will agree to sleep with him. But what was the state of my desire later? There was a meal with Chetverikov, the director of the VAAP [All-Union Agency on Copyrights], and S is seated at a distance. We leave for Leningrad by sleeper train. I desire him then, but we can’t do anything, and I don’t worry about it: I don’t care at this point whether it happens or not. Sunday, we visit Leningrad, Dostoevsky’s house in the morning. I think I’ve been wrong about his attraction to me and think of it no more (am I sure about that?). Meal at the Hotel Europe: I’m seated next to him, but that has happened many times since the beginning of the trip. (One day, in Georgia, when he was seated next to me, I spontaneously wiped my wet hands on his jeans.) On the visit to the Hermitage, we’re not together much. Crossing a bridge over the Neva on the way back, we’re together, leaning on the parapet with our elbows. Dinner at the Hotel Karelia: I am seated apart from him. RVP eggs him on to get Marie to dance. It’s a slow number. Yet 17I know he has the same desire as me. (I have just forgotten an episode: the ballet, before dinner. Sitting beside him, I can think of nothing but my desire for him, especially during the second part of the performance: The Three Musketeers, Broadway-style. I’ve still got the music in my head. I tell myself that if I can remember the name of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s companion, a dancer, we’ll sleep together. I remember, it’s Lucette Almanzor.) In his room, where he’s invited us to come drink vodka, he visibly arranges things so as to be sitting next to me. Great difficulty in ousting F, who fancies me and wants to be near me too. And then I know, I feel it, I am sure. It’s the perfect sequence of moments: our connection, the strength of a desire that has had little need for words, the great beauty of it. The few seconds’ separation which ignites the fusion by the door. We clutch each other, kissing as if to die from it. He tears my mouth, my tongue from me, crushes me against him.
Seven years after my first trip to the USSR, I have a revelation about my relation to men (that is, my relations with one particular man, with him, not another, as with Claude G and then Philippe in the past). The immense fatigue. S is thirty-six (he looks thirty), is slim, and tall (next to him, in heels, I am petite), with green eyes and light brown hair. The last time I thought of P was in bed, after making love – faint sorrow. Now all I think about is seeing S again, and living this passion to the limit. And like Philippe in ’63, S will return to Paris on 30 September.
Thursday 29
Sometimes I can picture his face, but only fleetingly. There, now, I’ve lost it again. I know his eyes, the shape of 18his lips, his teeth, but they do not form a whole. Only his body is identifiable – his hands, not yet. I am consumed with desire, to the point of tears. I want perfection in love, as I believe I attained a kind of perfection in writing with A Woman’s Story. That can only happen through giving, while throwing all caution to the wind. I’m already well on my way.
Friday 30
He hasn’t called yet. I don’t know what time his plane gets in. He is part of that lineage of tall, blond, and slightly shy men who marked the course of my youth and whom I always sent packing in the end. But now I know that only they can put up with me and make me happy. How to explain the strange, silent accord of that Sunday in Leningrad, if it’s all meant to end? Deep down, I don’t believe it’s possible for us not to see each other. The question is when.
October Saturday 1
It was a quarter to one. His flight was three hours late. Painful happiness. It really makes no difference if he calls or not, the excruciating tension is the same. I’ve known this since the age of sixteen (with G de V, Claude G, Philippe – the three main ones – and then with P). Is this the beginning of a ‘beautiful love story’? I am afraid to die on the road between Lille and Paris tonight, afraid of anything that could keep me from seeing him again.
19Sunday 2
Fatigue, torpor. Slept four hours after my return from Lille. Made love for two hours in David’s studio (David and Éric are my two sons). Bruises, pleasure, and the constant awareness of making the most of these moments, before the departure, before desire wanes. Before the terrible threat of ‘I’m too old’. But at thirty-five, I could have been jealous of a beautiful woman of fifty.
Parc de Sceaux, the ponds and canal, cold damp weather, the smell of earth. In ’71, when I was here to pass the agrégation,1 I never would have guessed that I’d return to this park with a Soviet diplomat. (As it is, I’ve already pictured myself going back in a few years to retrace the steps of today’s walk, as I did a month ago in Venice, in memory of ’63.)
He likes fancy cars, luxury, social connections, and isn’t much of an intellectual. This too is a step back in time, to the hateful image of my husband, but even that now appears to me in a pleasant light, because it corresponds to a part of my past. I’m not even afraid in the car with him.
How do I go about this so that my attachment doesn’t show too quickly and so that the difficulty of keeping me becomes apparent to him, at least once in a while?
Monday 3
Last night, he called. I was sleeping. He wanted to come around. Not possible. (Éric here.) Restless night, what to do with this desire? The same goes for today, when again I won’t see him. I weep from desire, this all-consuming 20hunger for him. He represents the most ‘parvenu’ part of myself, the most adolescent too. He’s not very intellectual, loves fancy cars, music while he drives. He likes to ‘make a splash’. He’s that ‘man of my youth’, blond and unrefined (his hands, his square fingernails), who fills me with pleasure (and whom I no longer wish to reproach for his lack of intellectualism). Nonetheless, I really need to catch up on my sleep now. I’m at the point of total exhaustion, unable to do anything. Love and mourning are one and the same for me, in body and in mind.
Song by Edith Piaf: Mon Dieu, laissez le-moi, encore un peu, un jour, deux jours, un mois, le temps de s’adorer et de souffrir…2 The longer I live, the more I abandon myself to love. The illness and death of my mother revealed the strength of my need for the other. When I say, ‘I love you’ to S, I am amused to hear him reply, ‘Thank you!’ which is not so very far from ‘Thank you, think nothing of it!’ And he says to me with happiness and pride, ‘You’ll see my wife!’ As for me, I’m the writer, the foreigner, the whore – the free woman too. I’m not the ‘good woman’, whom one possesses and displays, the one who gives consolation. I can’t console anyone.
Tuesday 4
I don’t know if he wants us to continue. ‘Diplomatic’ illness, he says (laughs!). I’m on the verge of tears, for the party is not happening. How often have I waited, got ready, made myself ‘beautiful’ and welcoming, and then – nothing. It did not happen. And for me he’s so impenetrable, mysterious by necessity, and probably full of deceit 21by nature. He’s been with the Party since ’79. Proud, as if it were a step up in life, an exam he passed: he is among the finest servants of the Soviet Union.
My only scrap of happiness all day: being hit on in the RER by a young lout, and producing the right lingo, which came to my lips spontaneously: ‘Keep that up and I’ll knock your lights out!’ etc. Oh, to be the heroine of a squalid little pickup attempt in a deserted RER, with two stooges looking on.
Is the happiness with S already over?
Wednesday 5
Nine o’clock, last night, a call … ‘I’m here, close by, in Cergy…’ He came around and we spent two hours shut into my study, as David is here. This time, there is no restraint on his part. Later, I could not sleep, could not detach myself from his body, which remained inside me. That’s my whole drama, I’m unable to forget the other, to be autonomous. I soak up other people’s words and actions, my body absorbs the other body. It’s so difficult to work after a night like this.
Thursday 6
Last night, he collected me in Cergy and we went to David’s studio on rue Lebrun. Semi-darkness, his body both visible and veiled. The usual madness for nearly three hours. On our return he drove quickly, with the radio playing (‘En rouge et noir’, a hit from last year), flashing the headlights off and on. He shows me the powerful car he wants to buy. He’s the perfect parvenu, a little 22boorish (‘The holidays aren’t over yet, we can still hook up,’ he says…). Misogynistic, too: women in politics are hilarious, women are terrible drivers, etc. And it’s me who revels in it … my strange pleasure in it all. More and more I see in him ‘the man of my youth’, the ideal I described in Cleaned Out. After we’ve arrived at the gate in front of the house, there is one final scene, a superb enactment (it feels to me) of that thing called love, for want of another word: he leaves the radio on (Yves Duteil, ‘Le petit pont de bois’) and I stroke him with my mouth until he comes, there, in the car, in the allée des Lozères. Afterwards, we lose ourselves in each other’s eyes. This morning when I wake up, I go over the scene interminably. He’s been back in France for less than a week, and already we’re so attached, so free with each other’s bodies (we have done almost everything that can be done), compared to how we were in Leningrad. I’ve always made love and always written as if I were going to die afterwards (moreover, I longed for an accident, for death, as we were driving back to my place on the motorway last night).
Friday 7
Desire not exhausted but continually renewed, with greater pain and power. I can no longer picture his face when he’s not here. Even when I’m with him, I see him differently from before. He has another face, so close, so irrefutable, like a double. I almost always take the lead, but in accordance with his desires. Last night, I was sleeping when he phoned, which often happens. Tension, happiness, desire. My name murmured with that guttural accent which palatalizes and emphasizes the first syllable, making the second one very short (aân’i). No one will 23ever say my name that way again.
I remember my arrival in Moscow, in 1981 (around 9 October), the Russian soldier, so tall, so young, I burst into tears, overwhelmed to be there, in that near-imaginary country. Now it is a little as if I were making love with that Russian soldier and all the emotion of seven years ago had led to S. One week ago, I did not foresee this conflagration. André Breton wrote, ‘We made love as the sun beats, as coffins close’ – that pretty much describes us.
Saturday 8
The studio on rue Lebrun. Slight weariness at first, then sweetness and exhaustion. At one point, he said, ‘I’ll call you next week’ – in other words, ‘I don’t want to see you over the weekend.’ I smile – in other words, I accept. There is suffering and jealousy on my part, though I know very well it’s best to plan slightly longer intervals between meetings. I am back in the ‘day-after’ state of disarray. I’m afraid of seeming clingy and old (clingy because old), and wonder if I shouldn’t play the separation card, double or nothing!
Tuesday 11
He left at 11 p.m. It’s the first time I’ve made love for so many hours in a row, without a lull. At ten thirty he gets up. Me: Would you like anything? Him: Yes, you. Back to the bedroom. How difficult things will be at the end of October, which marks the end of our meetings, with the arrival of his wife. But will he be able to give them up 24as easily as that? He seems to me quite attached to the pleasure we have together. To hear him excoriate sexual freedom and pornography, and the philandering habits of the Georgians! Now he dares to ask me, ‘Did you come?’ He didn’t in the beginning. Tonight, anal sex for the first time. Good that the first time was with him. It’s true that a young man in one’s bed takes the mind off time and age. This need for a man is so terrible, so close to a desire for death, an annihilation of self, how long can it go on…
Wednesday 12
My mouth, face, and sex are ravaged. I don’t make love like a writer, that is, in a removed way, or while thinking, ‘I can use this in a book.’ I always make love as if it were the last time (and who’s to say it isn’t?), simply as a living being.
Think: in Leningrad, he was so awkward (due to shyness? or relative inexperience?). He’s becoming less and less so. Am I then, in some sense, an initiatrix? The role enchants me, but it is fragile and ambiguous. It holds no promise of longevity (he could push me away like a whore). His blitheness and contradictions amuse me: he talks about his wife, how they met, and the necessary restrictions on morality in the USSR, and minutes later, begs to go upstairs so we can make love. What happiness this is. And naturally his joy was palpable when I said, ‘You’re such a good lover!’ But I liked it too, in Leningrad, when he said something similar to me.
25Thursday 13
Here, mention should be made of the constant interplay between love and the desire for clothes, insatiable, though I suspect futile with regard to desire in general. It was the same in ’84, when I continually bought skirts, jumpers, dresses, etc. never looking at the price – spending as if there were no tomorrow.
This waiting for the phone to ring, in addition to his total inscrutability – what do I mean to him?
And I’m starting to learn Russian!
Saturday 15
At the foot of the stairs, rue Lebrun: he doesn’t knock and tries to enter. I turn the key. A soft, smooth body, not very manly, except for … And he’s tall, much taller than me. That gesture he has of turning out the light before we make love, interminably. Taking me home, he drives very quickly, my hand on his thigh – the stereotype. Love/death, but oh so intense.
Last Tuesday, when I was near La Défense, I thought about how much I love the world of the city, this landscape of tower blocks, of lights and even cars – faceless, crowded places, the site of meetings and passions, past and present (Le Mail in Yvetot, empty Sundays, quiet as the grave, ‘will I ever get out of this place?’…).
In any case, S is already a beautiful love story (and it’s only been three weeks).
26Monday 17
Always presume indifference. Today, I’m certain that nothing more will come of this after the end of October, and it may even end before. It occurred to me that I hadn’t asked his wife’s name (a subtle form of jealousy, or the desire to annihilate the other woman).
