Author Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize in literature this year (2022). Getting Lost is her memoir of an affair with a married Soviet diplomat from 1988 to 1990. This journal/memoir is very claustrophobic and repetitive, and I wonder why Ernaux would continue to have such an affair when it is so excruciatingly painful. She is not married, and the diplomat is, but she never wishes for him to leave his wife. What she really wants is to experience more sex, and given the detailed erotic attention she provides him, and the acts she performs to give him pleasure, the reader does wonder why he did not visit her more. Was he an idiot?
I can only imagine that Ernaux put herself through this affair because she is a writer, and these emotions are grist for her mill. But this work, from my vantage point, wasn’t worth the effort. The end product, the book, is flawed and just boring.
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