Simple Passion

Review

What an incredible piece of writing. In 61 pages, Ernaux illustrates how all-encompassing love can become, how it can turn into an obsession where everything is subject to it. No event is without link to the object of love, everything takes on a mystical connection.

At first I was tagging or highlighting things that I related to, had experienced in my affections. That became a real burden because it happens on almost every page.

Ernaux is quickly becoming a favorite. Her writing is so consistent, so clear. I hesitate to call it sparing, because it communicates so much with such precise prose. Some highlights:

• p6 - Every time [the telephone] rang, I was consumed with hope, which usually only lasted the time it took me slowly to pick up the receiver and say hello. When I realized it wasn’t him, I felt so utterly dejected that I began to loathe the person who was on the line.
• p20 - I am merely listing the signs of passion, wavering between “one day” and “every day,” as if this inventory could allow me to grasp the reality of my passion.
• p22 - He liked being told that he resembled Alain Delon. (TB: Holy shit, who wouldn’t? Alain Delon in PURPLE NOON? Took my breath away.)
• p43 - I imagined that we had met in a hotel, at an airport, or that he had sent me a letter. I replied to words he had never spoken, sentences he would never write.

And in a paragraphical she gives us this:

• p50 - Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.

I realized, reading this, that it is exactly what I hope for in my writing. To be vulnerable, too, which Ernaux does with an almost clinical feeling. There is a thought that vulnerability means exposing yourself, and that it is brave. I don’t think it’s brave, I think it’s a way to feel connection with other people, and to expose a part of you that if not let out will devour your insides. I think Ernaux would agree. I aspire to writing that is this good, communicates this much, and can be meaningful to someone in the way this is meaningful and reflective to me.

Notes

• p6 - Every time [the telephone] rang, I was consumed with hope, which usually only lasted the time it took me slowly to pick up the receiver and say hello. When I realized it wasn’t him, I felt so utterly dejected that I began to loathe the person who was on the line.
• p10 - Naturally I would never wash until the next day, to keep his sperm inside me.
• p11 - As in the past, when the longer I waited after taking an exam the more I became convinced I had filed, so now, as the days went by without him ringing, I was certain he had left me.
• p12 - Quite often I felt I was living out this passion in the same way I would have written a book: the same determination to get every single scene right, the same minute attention to detail. I could even accept the thought of dying providing I had lived this passion through to the very end–without actually defining “to the very end”–in the same way I could die in a few months’ time after finishing this book.
• p20 - I am merely listing the signs of passion, wavering between “one day” and “every day,” as if this inventory could allow me to grasp the reality of my passion.
• p21 - I do not wish to explain my passion–that would imply it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify–I just want to describe it.
• p22 - He liked being told that he resembled Alain Delon. (TB: Holy shit, who wouldn’t? Alain Delon in PURPLE NOON? Took my breath away.)
• p26 - (Also, I didn’t want to suffer unnecessarily by imagining A making love to her, which happened every time I saw her. The fact that I considered her to be plain, or that he did it simply because he had her “close at hand” did nothing to lessen the torment of this vision.)
• p27 - Sometimes I told myself that he might spend a whole day without even thinking about me. I imagined him getting up, drinking his coffee, talking, and laughing, as if I didn’t exist. Compared to my own obsession, such indifference filled me with wonder. How could this be? He himself would have been astonished to find out that I never stopped thinking about him from morning to night.
• p39 - He left France and went back to his own country six months ago. I shall probably never see him again. At first, when I woke up at two o’clock in the morning, I didn’t care whether I lived or died. My whole body ached. I would have liked to tear out the pain but it was everywhere. I longed for a burglar to come into my bedroom and kill me.
• p42 - I could no longer stand the company of others. The only people I saw were those I had met during my relationship with A. They featured in my passion.
• p43 - I imagined that we had met in a hotel, at an airport, or that he had sent me a letter. I replied to words he had never spoken, sentences he would never write.
• p44 - I was always calculating, “it’s two weeks, five weeks since he left” or “last year, around this time, I was there, I was doing that.”
• p50 - Sometimes I wonder if the purpose of my writing is to find out whether other people have done or felt the same things or, if not, for them to consider experiencing such things as normal. Maybe I would also like them to live out these very emotions in turn, forgetting that they had once read about them somewhere.
• p58 - I shall never see that man again. Yet it is that surreal, almost non-existent last visit that gives my passion its true meaning, which is precisely to be meaningless, and to have been for two years the most violent and unaccountable reality ever.