Will I love Simple Passion?

It is unlike anything else I have read, a kind of forensic pathologist’s report on the body and brain of a woman, her younger self. She dissects a sexual affair, which absorbed her completely. There is nothing tender or sentimental here.

A divorcee in her 50s with grown-up sons, she neglects her career, scouring the shops for silk underwear and stiletto heels, reliving the details of their latest bedroom gyrations and longing for the next encounter. The (younger) man, who likes fast cars and sharp suits, wants the sex, nothing more.

Ernaux’s honesty, unsparing detail and detachment are extraordinary, and… show more.

When I was puzzling through how on earth to write about unreasonable desire, I found many of my unformed thoughts reflected in recent Nobel-prize winner Annie Ernaux’s very short Simple Passion.

Ernaux’s narrator records in detail her affair with a man that seemed to possess her for a while, and believes she “could even accept the thought of dying providing [she] had lived this passion through to the very end.”

She becomes, she believes, acquainted with what people are “capable of; in other words, anything.”

It is a passion told dispassionately, and a rare record of what erotic obsession… show more.