Ernaux's Simple Passions is a dazzlingly simple study in the language of passion

After reading many of Ernaux’s work, this one has simply left me bedazzled. The sharpness of the simplicity of expression without the excesses is how she handles so meticulously the emotion that it doesn’t need emotional words, phrases or sentences.

Have I been stupefied with her writing? Absolutely! To turn real life into a breathing narrative is what Ernaux does best and is also the bases of her auto-fiction. But when do you lose the sense of what is a 100% real and what isn’t ?

Cover of Nobel Prize Winner Annie Ernaux's Simple Passion

Ernaux details her shopping sprees that would be noticed only for a fraction of a second by A , her illicit love affair. The clothes she buys then are an affect of what she is expected to do a women for a man but which, in all likelihood, he would only see before all clothes are left entangled on the floor.

However, the need to show up in her best, to make sense of clothing herself which has become an activity done just for him, she ends up buying them still because he must not see her repeat any clothes. But, narrating life takes a celestial turn when A , after months of excruciating absence, comes back to her and the narrator ( it’s always a question, is it Ernaux?) meets him with a new shawl wrapped around her body that feels like not a conscious decision of the real life but rather the logic of a fictional one.

It’s moments like these that turn the non-fiction into auto-fiction. Bring the extraordinariness of life right to life but in writing. Plus, this time, in Simple Passion, she does something more to impress how her life is the manifesto of each and everything she writes as she tries to show “this photo” of A to the reader whilst she is writing making the act of living and writing congruous as if if she didn’t write, for her it wouldn’t have happened at all.

Thus she writes, writes out her passion, shameful and glorious at the same time, because in conversation even the deepest desires seem the most trivial. Thus she becomes a chronicler of her own life and as the title of the book reads, it’s a simple book of passion but by an intellectual who happens to be a woman.