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. ...
Notes p9 - But I don’t see anyone but him, this slender and distant boy who doesn’t speak, who’s happy just to listen to the two guys talking next to him without interrupting. Without even smiling. p14 - I find it a handsome name, a beautiful identity. I don’t know yet that one day I will write books, that I will invent characters and I will have to name those characters, but I am already sensitive to the sound of identities, to their fluidity. p15 - In any case, I like to repeat his name to myself in secret. I like to write it on scraps of paper. I am stupidly sentimental: that hasn’t changed much. p17 - I feel this desire swarming in my belly and running up my spine. But I have to constantly contain and compress it so that it doesn’t betray me in front of others. Because I’ve already understood that desire is visible. This feeling of love, it transports me, it makes me happy. At the same time, it consumes me and makes me miserable, the way all impossible loves are miserable. Difficulty, you can cope with; you can deploy ruses, try to seduce. There is beauty in the hope of conquest. But impossibility, by nature, carries with it a sense of defeat. p22 - I remember, also, that he’s reserved in a way that sets him apart. I could be put off, but instead it moves me. Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them. p23 - He says that he can no longer be alone with this feeling. That it hurts him too much. p24 - He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay. p30 - Love, it’s mouths that seek, lips that bite, drawing a little blood. His stubble irritates my chin, his hands grab my jaw so that I can’t escape. p35 - I ask myself: Does he regret it? Was it only a stroke of madness for him? A tragic, wrongheaded, even grotesque error? He acts as if nothing happened, or as if everything should be forgotten, buried. It’s even worse than being forgotten, it’s a denial. And then suddenly, I can’t see anything but his rejection. It’s as if he’s negating everything that transpired between us, one body against the other, as if the image has been completely erased. p36 - I discover the pain of missing someone. I miss his skin, his body, which I once possessed and then had taken away from me. It must be given back under threat of madness. p37 - Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy. It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. But absence is, first and foremost, silence. p45 - This is important: he sees me in a certain way, a way he will never deviate from. In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become. p49 - He doesn’t notice my excitement when he comes in, or any of the efforts I’ve made either. p52 - All of a sudden I see a sort of admiration return to his face, but it’s a painful admiration; what he likes about me is also what keeps me separate from him. I’m still thinking that everything has to be done according to him and his desires. I’m not sure where this need for another man’s sex comes from but I sense that on the other side of all the repression and self-censoring there exists an equally powerful fervor. p53 - I will repeat to myself: I am for him a boy he fucks, nothing more. I’m reduced to a body, a penis, a function. p54 - He caresses me with hands that know exactly what to do. He bites my hips, my torso. He groans, no longer able to contain it, a sound that he releases maybe without even realizing it himself; he moves me tremendously. p58 - I explain that in general it’s the likelihood that actually matters more than the truth, that the feeling counts more than accuracy, and above all that a place is not a question of topography but rather the way that we describe it—not a photograph but an impression. p70 - I will discover that these books speak to me, and speak for me (and will become aware of the power of literary minimalism, the neutral voice that’s closer to reality). (TB: referencing Herve Guibert’s The Remarkable Adventures (title, perhaps as translated by M Ringwald?) and also the film The Wounded Man.) p76 - Immediately it makes me think of the world I’m excluded from, the friendships he’s developed, all the ordinary days that have nothing to do with me. The friends, the handshakes, crystallize it. p79 - Because this scene not only shows a life lived outside of me. It hurtles me back to a void, to nonexistence, really, in the cruelest way. Because it shows what is usually hidden from me. Because it shows the charm of this mysterious boy and how many attempts must be made before one can get close to him. (And when you’ve been hurt once, you’re afraid to try again later, in dread of enduring the same pain. You avoid getting hurt in an attempt to avoid suffering: for years, this principle will serve as my holy sacrament. So many lost years.) p86 - I wrote the word: love. I did consider using another one. It’s a curious notion, love; difficult to identify and define. There are so many degrees and variations. … But those would have just been words. The truth, the brutal truth, was that I was in love. Enough to use the right word. p89-90 - He smiled so that I could take his smile with me. p92 - Everything in its place, everything reassures me. Except that I miss Thomas. I miss him terribly. And that changes everything. Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly? (TB: Yes.) p95 - …who asks himself if it would’ve just been better if his body had been left to die in the crash but who eventually heals, because as is often the case, you eventually heal. p101 - He says: You must have liked him a lot, to look at me like that. p103 - These last words are articulated with the lease possible affect, as if life is just like that sometimes, you spend time together and then lose touch and life goes on—as if there were no breaks from which you never quite recover. p109 - I think: If it was already there, this sadness, from the very first hours of the marriage, if it was so massive that it could not be concealed even then, during these moments of the greatest communion, during that happiest of feasts—how heavy must this weight have become in the years that followed? p116 - My father told me about you. p117 - He says: Though my father never reads books, he’s read yours. He intimates that the books are in their house, though not in plain sight; no doubt they’re tucked away in a closet somewhere or in the attic. p118 - I give in and say: The story of two inseparable friends who end up being separated by time. He smiles. I urge him not to read anything personal into it. I specify my books are fiction, that memoir doesn’t interest me. (TB: lol get real buddy, we’re all writing about ourselves and our loves and our losses. Nothing else exists.) p148 - I just wanted to write to tell you that I have been happy during these months together, that I have never been so happy, and that I already know I will never be so happy again. Review A heartbreaking book. A line comes for us in the final 20 pages that made me stop and put the book to my face and take deep breaths. Then we are taken through it for the remainder, and at the end I cried. I cried. ...
I think this is my favorite book I’ve read in a book club. I am afraid to share what I love so much about it. But I see myself in this book in a way I never have so completely. Not all of Leda is me, but so much is that it felt fragile and scary to read at times. Sometimes it was a loving familiarity, or even a pleading with him to do something different. My copy is riddled with sticky tabs sometimes two to a page and often every other page so that it looks like the centrepiece of a research project. I have filled the margins with pencil scratchings. I have no idea if I could ever describe my feelings for it. ...
Notes p11 - “Listen, Robert, going to another country doesn’t make any difference. I’ve tried all that. You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.” p26 - “Don’t you love me?” “Love you? I simply turn all to jelly when you touch me.” “Isn’t there anything we can do about it?” … “And there’s not a damn thing we could do,” I said. “I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t want to go through that hell again.” p27 - “It’s funny. And it’s a lot of fun, too, to be in love.” “Do you think so?” her eyes looked flat again. “I don’t mean fun that way. In a way it’s an enjoyable feeling.” “No,” she said. “I think it’s hell on earth.” “It’s good to see each other.” “No. I don’t think it is.” “Don’t you want to?” “I have to.” p31 - My head started to work. The old grievance. p31 - Probably I never would have had any trouble if I hadn’t run into Brett when they shipped me to England. I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyway.. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. p34 - This was Brett, that I felt like crying about.. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. p99 - Why I felt the impulse to devil him I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him. p136 - “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” p148 - I could shut my eyes without getting the wheeling sensation. But I could not sleep. There is no reason why because it is dark you should look at things differently from when it is light. The hell there isn’t! p183 - “Do you still love me, Jake?” “Yes,” I said. “Because I’m a goner,” Brett said. “How?” “I’m a goner. I’m mad about the Romero boy. I’m in love with him, I think.” … “Oh, darling, please stay by me. Please stay by me and see me through this.” p197 - “Badly cogido,” he said. “All for sport. All for pleasure.” p239 - That seemed to handle it. That was it. Send a girl off with one man. Introduce her to another to go off with him. Now go and bring her back.. And sign the wire with love. That was all right. p245 - [Jake] “I thought you weren’t going to talk about it.” “How can I help it?” “You’ll lose it if you talk about it.” Review I picked this book off my shelf a few months ago knowing that I was on a high-speed collision course with a re-read. I am not sure where I got this copy. It is dated on the inside cover in handwriting 1966. It is blue clothbound and cotton paged, and the pages feel very nice. ...
This was an impulse buy. I read this several years ago at the height of my Francophile days when I was able to speak French about half as well as I could read it. Now I can read it okay and speak it only when drunk, and quite poorly. My mom told me a week or two ago that she wanted me to think about going to Paris again. This is something I have wanted to do for years but I have never traveled internationally and not much domestically. You read Baldwin and Hemingway and Hugo and the others and see Paris as this imperfectly perfect place. Somewhere that a lost person can go to figure things out. I am not convinced any such place really exists outside of the mind, but in the same breath I’ll say context matters. Anyway I’m filling out passport paperwork again and maybe I will save enough to go and cheaply. ...
I bought the Picador Modern Classics hardcover of this a week or two ago on a whim. I was trying to find gifts for family and ended up buying this for myself instead. I think this is my third read of the book? I read a lot of Isherwood aroundabouts 2013 when I was fresh out of high school and struggling with being gay. It didn’t really matter that the time period was all wrong, or that things were so different. A lot of things weren’t different, and it was more or less about reading books that showed relationships and love in a non-heterosexual way. ...