The Possession

Review

An absolute beauty of emotion, particularly jealousy and haunting. Ernaux describes the end of a relationship and the sense that she has been possessed by the ‘other woman’ in terms so raw and so relatable that you (or, I,) feel professionally jealous of the skill with which it is executed.

I think a lot about sentimentality, because I am a sentimental person. Places become stained with chance meetings or meaningful silences. Forever after, I think of those moments when passing by. In warmth, these are pleasant reminders and stoke joy. Once things change, deteriorate, complicate, they’re falling icicles piercing your heart. It happens to places, films, books, songs, even whole genres of idea; anything that was important or noteworthy.

I continue to admire and love the way that Ernaux writes. I will be at a loss when I finally read everything through.

Notes

p10 - This state kept my daily troubles and cares at bay. In a way, it placed me outside the grip of life’s usual mediocrity. But any reflection that politics or current events would normally arouse in me was lost, too.

p14 - The film that I was accustomed to playing in my head – images of happy moments to come, a night out, holidays, a birthday dinner – these ordinary auto-fictions anticipating the pleasures of a normal life were replaced by images rushing in from the outside to stab me in the chest. I was no longer free in my daydreams. I was no longer the subject even of my own fantasies. I had been occupied by a woman I had never seen. Or, to borrow the word of a Senegalese man who once told me he was being possessed by an enemy, I was maraboutee.

p39 - The image of his cock on the other woman’s belly came up less frequently than that of a daily life that that of a daily life that he evoked carefully in the singular and I heard always in the plural. It was not the erotic gestures that would bind him most to her (these happened all the time and without consequence on the beach, in the corner of an office, in rooms rented by the hour), but the baguette that he would bring home for her at lunchtime, their underwear mingled together in the laundry basket, the television show that they watched in the evenings while eating spaghetti bolognese. Out of my sight, a process of domestication, slow and sure, had begun to grip him tightly; with the shared breakfasts and toothbrushes in the same glass, a mutual impregnation that he seemed to wear, physically, in an impalpable way, an air of vague satiation that conjugal life sometimes give to men.