From Publishers Weekly
Because Ernaux has written about her mother ( A Woman's Story ), her father ( A Man's Place ) and herself ( Cleaned Out ), one can almost hear an anxious tremor in the narrator's (Ernaux's?) lover's voice as he says, "You won't write a book about me." But she has. Actually, it's not about him but about their affair and even more about the intense time between their intimacies. "I've experienced pleasure," she says, "as future pain." At the peak of their liaison, the successful, well-educated narrator is able to concentrate only on what furthers or reflects her passions: she shops for clothes, listens to popular songs, reads the horoscopes in women's magazines, watches pornographic television, searches for a theater showing Nagisa Oshima's carnal In the Realm of the Senses and, of course, waits anxiously by the phone. Whether or not "A," a married Eastern European businessman, was "worth it," is, she says, "of no consequence." Ernaux alternates between writerly objectivity and total immersion, blurring the line between fiction and autobiography. Throughout, one finds oneself noting, "but, of course, this is a novel" only to add a few pages later "but, of course, this is real life." Since less time has elapsed between events recorded here and those she so poignantly recalled in her earlier books, perhaps it is just this lack of reflective distance that makes Simple Passion less successful than its predecessors.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
$15. F In books like A Woman's Story ( LJ 4/1/91) and Cleaned Out ( LJ 12/90), best-selling French novelist Ernaux takes apparently autobiographical facts and constructs perfect little novels in almost unimaginably distilled prose. Here she continues in the same vein. The narrator of her newest work, whom we are persuaded to believe is the author herself, details her passion for a married man. Actually, this is more the story of passionate waiting, and we see how the woman's single-minded attachment to her somewhat careless lover colors everything in her life. The book caused a sensation in France, with many parents refusing to let their children read it. One suspects that the real problem was not the details of love making but the coolly clinical approach, which is almost antierotic and tends to deglamorize something that most of us like to pretend is a big mystery. This is an original work, certainly not for everyone, but worth including in collections for adventuresome readers.
- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
