WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
2022 NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK
The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat.
Getting Lost is the diary Annie Ernaux kept during the year and a half she had a secret love affair with a younger, married man, a Russian diplomat. Her novel, Simple Passion, was based on this affair, but here her writing is immediate, unfiltered.
In these diaries it is 1989 and Annie is divorced with two grown sons, living outside 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, saying “his desire for me is the only thing I can be sure of.” She cannot write, she trudges distractedly through her various other commitments in the world, she awaits his next call; she lives only to feel desire and for the next rendezvous. When he is gone and the 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. Getting Lost is as strong a book as any that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.
- ISBN10 1644212196
- ISBN13 9781644212196
- Publish Date 4 October 2022 (first published 21 September 2022)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 2 October 2022
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Seven Stories Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 240
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781644212196