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Getting Lost

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Getting Lost

By: Annie Ernaux, Alison L. Strayer - translator
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
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About this listen

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 she has written, a haunting, desperate view of a strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.

©2021, 2022 Gallimard, Paris; Translation by Alison L. Strayer (P)2023 Dreamscape Media
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The truth about passion

The evolutionary function of passion is to get us to chase a mate - neurochemically, passion is a motivational mechanism. If there are obstacles to a relationship, extra motivation is needed: people begin to crave the other, going through withdrawal.

Annie Ernaux writes down what this feels like. Simply and precisely, her diary reveals what passion does, how one experiences beauty alternating with the sense of being addictied. Rationally, Annie is very aware of her lover's flaws and of the situation. She finds herself needing him anyway. This is a book about a very human helplessness, beautifully narrated and expertly written. Life on the page, as it is.

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Self indulgent nonsense

Reads like a teenagers diary about the boy she is fixated on. Must admit I didn’t get to the end so maybe it improves but I couldn’t take anymore. Avoid.

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