The Possession

Self-regard, in the works of Annie Ernaux, is always an excruciatingly painful and exact process. Here, she revisits the peculiar kind of self-fulfillment possible when we examine ourselves in the aftermath of a love affair, and sometimes, even, through the eyes of the lost beloved.

A gorgeous, brutally honest self-portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended.

Karen Walton Morse - Library Journal

Ernaux's latest book to be translated into English (after Simple Passion: A Woman's Story) is the story of an all-consuming jealousy-a self-portrait whose spare 64 pages sketch the life cycle of a possession. A woman has left a man "as much out of boredom as from an inability to give up [her] freedom." The relationship may have been forgettable, but the narrator finds the idea of the man being with another woman unbearable, and her life is soon eclipsed by an obsession with that nameless, faceless woman. Occupation, the title of the original French edition, more clearly elucidates this state with its double entendre: the narrator is both engaged and possessed. While actively cultivating the obsession, the narrator is also very much concerned with chronicling it; this work is as much about the act of writing the novella as it is about the six months it recounts. Clearly for sophisticated readers.

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy. In 1984, she won the Prix Renaudot for her book La Place. Eight of her novels have been published in America, including A Woman's Story, a NY Times Notable Book, and A Man's Place, a NY Times Notable Book and a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize. Anna Moschovakis has translated works by Claude Cahun, Henri Michaux, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Alféri, and others. Her translation of George Simenon's _The Engagement_ was published by New York Review Books in 2006 as the series' 200th book. She is also a poet and an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.