‘The Possession’ by Annie Ernaux

Now in her mid-eighties, and hugely better known in the UK than she once was thanks to the not-so-small achievement of winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, Annie Ernaux’s books are steadily being translated from the French and published by Fitzcarraldo.

This one was originally published in Paris in 2002, but only came out in translation in the UK in 2025. Like her other books, it is a slim and extraordinarily frank slice of personal memoir. I have read all of these now, I think, but very much hope there may yet be still more still awaiting an English publication.

The episode described in ‘The Possession’ took place in the mid-1980s, when Annie Ernaux was in her late forties. This was a time when I visited Paris frequently, including two long summers very happily spent at Sorbonne summer schools, so the time and setting are particularly evocative for me.

Annie Ernaux, as anyone who has read her other books will know, is both an intellectual and a woman who has always taken a proudly bohemian approach to life. Throughout she has not only ‘taken lovers’, but has chosen to write about these affairs with terrific candour. Her memoirs, I always think, deal exclusively with the aspects of life that everybody else leaves out of their accounts. Sexual obsession, jealousy, humiliation, vanity and all kinds of other thoughts and behaviour that most people would carefully edit out of a publish narrative about themselves are subjected to Ernaux’s remarkably unsparing scrutiny.

And they are left out for a good reason. It is extremely difficult to write engagingly about sexual experience in a manner that is neither embarrassing nor arousing. Somehow Annie Ernaux manages it, usually by focusing less on the mechanics and more on her own emotional responses. She also always tells a dam good story.

Here the focus is on romantic jealousy. The man she is having an affair with is rather younger than she is, and while he is happy to carry on seeing her occasionally, he has moved in with another woman who is always from now on going to take first place in his affections. The result is a situation in which Annie Ernaux becomes obsessed with finding out who this woman is and as much as she can about her. This largely unknown love-rival steadily comes to occupy almost as much space in Annie Ernaux’s consciousness as the man himself.

The book’s title consequently has two meanings. Annie Ernaux is ‘possessed’ by jealousy precisely because she can no longer ‘possess’ the man whose affections she wants for herself. It is not an especially attractive emotion, and she makes no attempt to make herself appear more reasonable or dignified than she actually was at this time. As always, she just tells it as it was.

The writing is sublime and, as she did famously in her masterpiece ‘The Years’, Annie Ernaux is particularly good at conjuring up a period through references to popular culture while also narrating her emotional responses:

For the first time, I could clearly perceive the material nature of feelings and emotions – I physically felt their consistency, their form but also their independence, their perfect freedom with respect to my consciousness. These interior states had their equivalent in nature: the surge of a wave, the crumbling of a cliff, sinkholes, algae blooms. I understood the necessity of comparisons and metaphors using water and fire. Even the most overused of them had first been lived, one day, by someone.

Continually, songs or news reports on the radio, advertisements, would plunge me back into the time of my relationship with W. Hearing ‘I’ll be waiting’, ‘Juste quelqu’un de bien’ or an interview with Ousmane Sow whose colossal statues on the Pont des Arts we had seen together, put a catch in my throat. Any evocation of a separation or a departure – one Sunday it was a host leaving FIP, the radio station where she had worked for thirty years – was enough to wreck me completely. Like people made fragile by disease or depression, I was an echo chamber for all pain everywhere.

It is important, here, to recognise the extraordinary skill of Ernaux’s translator, Anna Moschovakis. The emotions being described are entirely recognisable, but often difficult to put into words even in one’s own language. To render such finely calibrated emotional states into English while retaining prose of this clarity and elegance is a most impressive achievement.

This is another remarkable little book. There is something extraordinary about Annie Ernaux’s willingness to expose emotions and behaviour that most of us would carefully edit out of any account of ourselves. Jealousy is hardly an attractive emotion, and obsession with a former lover’s new partner still less so. But that is precisely what makes ‘The Possession’ so compelling and interesting to read. Ernaux goes where other memoirists generally decline to go, and in doing so manages here, once again, to make an intensely private experience feel disconcertingly universal.