Welcome to Litsy!

“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.” Ernaux writes of a passion for someone that overwhelms. Having experienced something similar, in this sparse book she brought me back to a time that remains unexplainable to me and shows me I‘m not the only one. She writes almost as an observer and that‘s ⬇️

"I discovered what people are capable of, in other words, anything: sublime or deadly desires, lack of dignity, attitudes and beliefs I had found absurd in others until I myself turned to them. Without knowing it, he brought me closer to the world." A tiny, perfect gem of a book on passion & obsession. It's also an elegant time capsule: the era of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War & the start of the Gulf War captured succinctly.

My first book by Ernaux after she won the Pulitzer. I loved her sparse, raw writing in this short piece and definitely plan to read more of her work.

Ernaux writes about her all consuming relationship with a married man.

In the Norwegian translation this is under 60p so I don‘t want to say much more.

#1991 #192025

Such a short but compelling introduction to her writting. 3.5 🌟

“Beginning in September of last year, I did nothing else but wait for a man.” And so starts her impassioned account of an affair with a man who consumed her every thought, movement, and desire for months. Living in this suspended reality, in which every second existed for the sole purpose of accelerating time to a moment in the future when she‘d be lost in his presence once more, everything else just faded into the periphery. 5/5⭐️