Simple Passion

Rating:
Summary: Painfully Honest Account of Obsession
Review: I went into a local bookstore yesterday, and was drawn into the words of Ernaux. Her account of the emotional upheaval, loss of self and ultimate recovery was like reading the pages of someone's diary - nothing was held back. Ernaux explores how in a relationship one person often loses their very self in an attempt to be closer to the object of their desire. This account was not of a relationship so much as an obsession. The man who motivated these feelings was ultimately a stranger, unaware or indifferent to the power he held. It is Ernaux's ability to understand the small things, the details involved in the waiting for the next encounter with the unavailable lover, that makes her portrayal so real. In the end, this tale is not merely of an unjustified love or longing, but of a woman's search to find herself, the need to reconcile intellectual pursuits and passion while remaining authentic to her own being. This book may make you realize how you ascribe superhuman qualities to the object of your lust while degrading yourself. The need for balance and reciprocation stayed with me after my encounter with this often erotic and always intimate glipse into the soul of one consumed by passion.

Rating:
Summary: passion is the greatest high
Review: My favorite book. It honestly explores the effects of passion, and does so with total economy.
It is both dramatic and zenlike at the same time.
Most writers believe in the "show don't tell" aproach, but only the best writers, most of them being in my opinion, French, have a way of telling that exceeds the showing. Ernaux, like Gide and Duras, offers a very processed view of a relationship which becomes an intellectual experience --despite it revolving around a physical love affair. Ernaux transportes her readers, not necessarily into the moments, but into the DRAMA of them --getting us inside this woman's mind and body and feeling the pain and exstacy of the many stages of obsession.
While reading this book, I often had to pause and just sigh. And when I completed this slim novel, just a couple hours later (I really took my time), I began it again.

Rating:
Summary: passion is the greatest high
Review: My favorite book. It honestly explores the effects of passion, and does so with total economy.
It is both dramatic and zenlike at the same time.
Most writers believe in the "show don't tell" aproach, but only the best writers, most of them being in my opinion, French, have a way of telling that exceeds the showing. Ernaux, like Gide and Duras, offers a very processed view of a relationship which becomes an intellectual experience --despite it revolving around a physical love affair. Ernaux transportes her readers, not necessarily into the moments, but into the DRAMA of them --getting us inside this woman's mind and body and feeling the pain and exstacy of the many stages of obsession.
While reading this book, I often had to pause and just sigh. And when I completed this slim novel, just a couple hours later (I really took my time), I began it again.

Rating:
Summary: Passion Put Simply, but Beautifully
Review: My relationship to this book became very intimate after translating it from French to English for a college course. I really appreciated the subtlties of language that Ernaux mastered in Passion Simple. The French is marvelous, and the subject itself, passion/obsession, is pertinent. Most people reading this book are quick to judge the narrator's attitudes and actions. She, herself, is unwilling to do so in this book. Instead, she simply relays the facts. It is amazing how well she is able to do this so beautifully.

Rating:
Summary: Passion Put Simply, but Beautifully
Review: One review on the cover of this book says it is "a monument to passions". I believe it is an inconsequential anthill. This tiny little book, is in actuality simply an overpriced pamphlet. It consists of 64 pages but in large print and much doublespacing and footnotes at the bottom of some pages. Having just gone through the painful experience of wading through the 827 page Underworld by Don Delillo I decided to pick up this little book. It was a bad choice. There is nothing redeemable about the boring lackluster prose. The subject of love has been rhapsodied on for thousands of years and this boring little assemblage of pages adds nothing to its mystery. If anything, it cheapens it. With its emotionless tone, it resembles the side of a cereal box. Actually, the cereal box would be more entertaining. Ernaux could have minimalized her book even further by limiting it to two sentences: "Woman loves married man. Has affair with him that ends." Actually, these lines are good representatives of the prose style in Simple Passion. I could go on but then the review would be longer than the book.

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating look into the mind of an obsessive lover.
Review: SIMPLE PASSION is a woman's story of her affair with a married man. It is a short book which I read in one sitting. What makes the story special is that it only tells what her life is like when she is not with him. From the time he left her side until the next time she saw him she says she did nothing else but wait for him. She describes in detail her obsessive thinking about her lover. So although she never describes her time with him, all her time away from him is spent thinking about him, planning her next meeting with him, waiting for him to call, fantasizing about him. As she goes about her daily life, her mind never strays from him. It is as compelling a story as her obsession was to her.

Rating:
Summary: The universal is in the details
Review: Simple Passion is the account of a love affair with a married man told in the direct prose I have come to expect of Ernaux. She notes that her life was one of waiting, that everything other than their meetings became secondary. Her honesty forces her to admit that the affair was one of passion not of love. After he returned to his native country, she struggles to rebuild a life that is built on relationships with others, one built on life in general not passion. Ernaux is a master at making the direct details of her experience resonate with the experience of humanity as a whole. I recommend this book (or any of her books).

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful case of ennui; a painful but important read.
Review: This small volume retraces the painful loss of self a woman experiences while obsessing about the occasional attention she receives from a younger, married man from a "foreign" country. The unidentified woman, and the man she refers to as A, only meet for the intermittent adult romp that, in my view of her revelation, only brings her pain. Her entire existence for a two-year period is motivated by the time she is able to be with him ( which is rare ) and the opportunity she has to fantasize about him. The writer culminates the story by saying that she feels luxury is "being able to live out a passion for a man or a woman. In this case, however, as it seems in any obsessive relationship, there is only an abundance of pain and precious, lost time. Some people are real victims of the world and their suffering is not chosen. The pain in this book is particularly melancholy because it didn't have to be. I give this book 5 stars because it is a beautifully written account of something I never want to experience. We only have so much time on this earth, and suffering with obsession is not the kind of passion I would ever want to know. I understand it, I feel sympathy, I just don't want it.