Reading and Art Film: Annie Ernaux: “EINE LEIDENSCHAFT”

Irmi Horn

In the series Women Empowerment, Irmi Horn presents the novel by Annie Ernaux.

The physical suffering, the fear of waiting, the always only short relief of making love, the subsequent lethargy and fatigue, the renewed desire, the small humiliations and humiliations of obsession and abandonment – Annie Ernaux tells with a calm naturalness of a painfully long episode of her life; how she becomes increasingly entangled in an affair, falls for a married Eastern European businessman who has a vague resemblance to Alain Delon, likes fast cars and alcohol and does not know “obscene expressions in French, or he simply had no desire to use them”.

Annie Ernaux describes a two-year state of limbo, in which every word, every event and every other person either has an urgent connection to this man or is given by her with cold indifference. To a man who couldn’t be a stranger to her.

Annie Ernaux tells of an all-consuming passion for an irritatingly impathetic man – fearlessly she thoroughly searches for the truth behind an existence in which she visibly threatens to give up. (Suhrkamp)

Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux, born Duchesne (b. September 1940 in Lillebonne, Seine-Maritime) is a French writer. Her literary work is essentially autobiographical with a strong sociological reference. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Annie Ernaux spent her childhood and youth in Yvetot in Normandy. She grew up as an only child in modest but protected circumstances and was raised Catholic. Her parents were first workers and later ran a small shop with a café. After attending high school, Ernaux studied at the universities of Rouen and Bordeaux and received his doctorate in 1971. After that, she was a teacher at the Gymnasium of Bonneville in Savoy and at the Collège d’Évire in Annecy-le-Vieux, then in Pontoise near Paris, before working for 23 years at the National Center for Distance Learning, the Centre national d’enseignement à distance.

In 1964, she married Philippe Ernaux, with whom she has two sons, Éric (born 1964) and David (born 1968). The couple separated in 1981. Annie Ernaux now lives in Cergy near Paris.

Indoors during the cold season and bad weather!