The diary of one of France’s most important, award-winning writers during the year she had a passionate and secret love affair with a Russian diplomat
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 that she has written, a haunting, desperate view of strong and successful woman who seduces a man only to lose herself in love and desire.
Among the most influential and impactful writers in the world today, ANNIE ERNAUX was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and both the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize and the Prix Formentor for her body of work. She was awarded the International Strega Prize, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize. Her works include Cleaned Out, Do What They Say or Else, A Frozen Woman, A Man’s Place, A Woman’s Story, Simple Passion, Exteriors, Shame, “I Remain in Darkness,” Happening, Things Seen, Getting Lost, The Possession, The Use of Photography (with Marc Marie), The Years, The Other Girl, L’Atelier Noir, Retour à Yvetot, Look at the Lights, My Love, Le Vrai Lieu: Entretiens, A Girl’s Story, L’Ecriture comme un couteau, Hôtel Casanova and Other Brief Texts, The Young Man, and I Will Write to Avenge My People: The Nobel Lecture.
ALISON L. STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator. She won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, the Prix littéraire France-Québec, and the Man Booker International Prize. She lives in Paris.
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