Publishers Weekly
★ 09/25/2023
Nobel Prize winner Ernaux (The Years) recounts her yearlong affair with a man three decades her junior in this slim yet stunning memoir. After the man, a student referred to here only as “A,” made several attempts to contact Ernaux about her work, she began seeing and sleeping with him in 1998, when he was 24 and she was 54. Initially trepidatious, Ernaux quickly became enchanted by the ways A. helped her “travel through all the ages of life,” stirring memories of her own time as a student and reminding her of the working-class roots she’d learned to weed out in adulthood. Remarkably clear-eyed about the relationship’s pitfalls and pleasures, Ernaux shares, in fragments, the ways it provoked within her both a sense of righteousness (“Any fifty-something guy could carry on openly with a woman obviously not his daughter without arousing disapproval”) and sadness (“More and more it seemed to me that I could continue to accumulate images, experiences, years, and no longer feel anything but repetition itself”). Eventually, the sadness took over, and Ernaux ended their relationship in the fall of 1999, “happy to be entering the third millennium alone and free.” Throughout, she suffuses even simple moments—a brasserie lunch, a glimpse out of the window at her lover’s house—with a kind of magic, seamlessly layering the perspectives of her current and former selves. The result is a poignant and essential addition to Ernaux’s oeuvre. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
‘[Shame and The Young Man] deserve to be read widely. Her work is self-revealing, a series of pitiless auto-autopsies….Their disparate achievements work together to illuminate something perennially fascinating about Ernaux: her relationship to revelation and visibility. These are deeply intimate books, but in another way, Ernaux brings a disquieting impersonality to her project.’
— Megan Nolan, The Times
‘Annie Ernaux’s work is proof of how expertly autobiography can be done… The Young Man does offer a taste of what’s so unique and astonishing about her honesty, her intelligence, the deceptive simplicity of her narratives. And for those who have been reading her for decades, it adds invaluable information to what we have already learned about the sources of her energy and courage, about the complex connections between her life and her work, her lived experience and the grace with which she transforms memory into art.’
— Francine Prose, Guardian
‘Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over long conversations that sometimes take years, revealing things slowly, looping back to some parts of their life over and over.’
— Joanna Biggs, London Review of Books
‘Annie Ernaux is one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.’
— Sheila Heti, author of Pure Colour
‘I find her work extraordinary.’
— Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
‘But the brevity has a function. Ernaux’s works aren’t coy or glancing; they’ve been sharpened to a point. Though she seems like a writer of details, each book is a vital mission, carried out with thrusting force.’
— Tobi Haslet, Harper’s
‘That Ernaux can do so much — “The Young Man” tackles love, aging, desire, loss, misogyny, class and death — in such a small space is clearly the hallmark of a writer who has honed her craft to be razor sharp. It cuts to the bone.’
— Jessica Ferri, Washington Post
‘Ernaux has inherited de Beauvoir’s role of chronicler to a generation.’
— Margaret Drabble, New Statesman
‘Across the ample particularities of over forty years and twenty-one books, almost all short, subject-driven memoirs, Ernaux has fundamentally destabilized and reinvented the genre in French literature.’
— Audrey Wollen, The Nation
‘The Young Man is another opportunity to journey with Ernaux as she peels back an experience…’
— Pat Reber, Artsfuse
‘As Ernaux’s work shows, telling the story of a life always involves more than putting the facts of it in order. It means moving backward and forward through time, repeating and revisiting, uncovering old memories and fleshing out stories that have already been told. If you end up returning again and again to the same episodes, then so be it. Show them from different angles. Rearrange the order. Do whatever you must to make it new.’
— Maggie Doherty, New Republic
‘Like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, Ernaux’s affair should be counted as one of the great liaisons of literature.... I suspect the book will become a kind of totem for lovers: a manual to help them find their centre when, like Ernaux, they are lost in love. All her books have the quality of saving frail human details from oblivion. Together they tell, in fragments, the story of a woman in the twentieth century who has lived fully, sought out pain and happiness equally and then committed her findings truthfully on paper. Her life is our inheritance.’
— Ankita Chakraborty, Guardian (praise for Getting Lost)
‘Getting Lost is a feverish book. It’s about being impaled by desire, and about the things human beings want, as opposed to the things for which they settle ... it’s one of those books about loneliness that, on every page, makes you feel less alone.’
— Dwight Garner, New York Times (praise for Getting Lost)
‘From the very first lines, we feel ourselves, like her, caught up in the vertigo of waiting, obsessed by the telephone that never rings, time that passes too quickly and the meetings that become less frequent. Love, death and literature are constantly intertwined in this story that plunges us into the intimacy of a couple, without ever giving us the impression of being voyeurs.’
— Pascale Frey, Elle (praise for Getting Lost)
‘Ernaux has once more created a living document of existential terror and hope.’
— Catherine Taylor, Irish Times (praise for Getting Lost)
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2023-05-27
The Nobel laureate revisits a love affair with a much younger man.
In her latest book to appear in English, Ernaux recounts a brief love affair with A., a man who was 30 years her junior. “He gave me pleasure and made me relive things I would never have imagined experiencing again,” she writes. The book, which is slim, occasionally stark, and very much to the point—more an essay than a full-length volume—is by no means a florid account. Instead, Ernaux candidly describes how the relationship caused her to reexamine not only sex and sensuality, but memory and time itself. “With him I traveled through all the ages of life, my life,” she writes. Fittingly, she spends less time describing A. as a person than she does the various insights their relationship revealed. She was with a younger man “so that I would not continually be looking at the timeworn face of a man my age, the face of my own aging. When A.’s face was before me, mine was young too. Men have known this forever, and I saw no reason to deprive myself.” The major pleasure in reading this book—and it is a major pleasure—comes not so much from gasping over sensual details but from savoring Ernaux’s sentences and the searing clarity of her thinking. It isn’t just that she avoids sentimentality, though she does that, too. It’s that the author can (and does) analyze all kinds of intersecting threads—aging, class, desire, regret—without a sense of shame or an impulse to sugarcoat any of the truths she uncovered during her time with A. She even delves into the possibility of motherhood: “He wanted to have a child with me. This desire troubled me and made me feel the profound unfairness of being in good physical shape but no longer able to conceive.”
A crucial addition to Ernaux’s oeuvre.
