Annie Ernaux's Long Tango

Review of 'Getting Lost' for Arc Digital

It's worth noting however that ‘love’, in her case, is not the traditional, romantic, Jane Austen variety. Rather, it’s a form of intoxicating, physical passion; a rush of the flesh, that consumes her in its presence and absence, swallowing up everything else, and taking her back to youth. “My life is hollowed out by desire and pain” she writes; elsewhere, that “Spending an entire night with him is my only goal in life now, and I wonder what I would not willingly sacrifice in order to have it”. On the page before, she says; “Right now this seems so plausible that my heart is in my throat”. Never has such a common expression been so accidentally apt. She is madly in love with what he provides; and, as said, in the aforementioned Vernon Subutex 3, the “expression, ‘I’m mad about him,’ [can] be taken literally.”

My review of Nobel Prize winner, Annie Ernaux’s latest memoir, Getting Lost, is out now in Arc Digital.