76th book of 2022.

2.5. This was okay, maybe not the best place to enter Ernaux's work. I've had a copy of The Years for... years, but haven't read it yet. I couldn't resist this advance copy for Getting Lost which isn't published till September, though. It is a long-awaited, so I hear, translation of Ernaux's diaries detailing an affair with a Russian man known simply as S. If you are a fan of Ernaux already then perhaps you'd get more from this, 'know' her a little more and so maybe care a little more. I almost gave it three because there are some good lines about writing, about the self, but the whole thing does read like a diary. There is lots of being depressed, crying, it's 200 pages of telling. Ernaux never tried to write this in a beautiful way, I suppose; it's her diary. She prefaces it slightly by saying (warning?) that she changed/removed nothing from the diaries when writing them up. I'm with her on that, I wrote one of my Master's essays on unconscious writing. I appreciate the unabashed honesty of the whole thing.

There is a lot of sex involved and describing her positions, what she did, anal, the like, there is a lot of Proust quoting, Anna Karenina mentions. By the end it becomes more of a dream diary, at which point I began to check how far I was from the end. Some good lines (none of which I can quote because this is an advance copy) but overall felt a little pointless. Ernaux fans will enjoy it more than me. I'm now going to have to backtrack with my reading of her. Thanks to Fitzcarraldo for the ARC.