France

Simple Passion

Name: Simple Passion
ISBN: 978-1583225745

by Annie Ernaux

Love & Passion Literary Fiction Romance Contemporary Fiction Fiction 1991

Summary

Simple Passion is a concise, intensely personal account of a woman’s consuming affair with a married man. The narrator, an educated French woman, describes how her relationship gradually takes over her existence, shaping her thoughts, routines, and sense of time. Waiting for her lover’s phone calls and anticipating their meetings become the organising principles of her life, while ordinary activities lose their significance in comparison with the possibility of seeing him again.

Drawing on her own experiences, Annie Ernaux examines desire with remarkable honesty and emotional precision, refusing to romanticise or condemn the narrator’s obsession. She explores the vulnerability of surrendering oneself to another person, as well as the ways passion can disrupt independence and alter one’s perception of reality. Blending autobiography with detached observation, the book challenges conventional ideas about female desire, dignity, and romantic love. Its direct, unembellished prose transforms a deeply private experience into a broader reflection on the power of longing and the consuming nature of passion.

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About the author

Annie Ernaux

Annie Ernaux is a French writer known for her autobiographical fiction and deeply personal explorations of memory, class, gender, and social change. Born in Lillebonne, France, in 1940, she grew up in a working-class family whose experiences of social mobility and economic hardship became central to her writing. Her distinctive style blends personal recollection with sociological observation, examining how individual lives are shaped by history, cultural expectations, and social structures. Her notable works include A Man’s Place (1983), which reflects on her relationship with her father and her working-class origins, A Woman’s Story (1987), a portrait of her mother, and The Years (2008), a collective autobiography tracing French society from the postwar period to the early twenty-first century. In 2022, Ernaux received the Nobel Prize in Literature for her courageous and incisive examination of personal memory and collective experience. Her work has profoundly influenced contemporary autobiographical literature.

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Details

Published: 1991
Author: Annie Ernaux

Simple Passion

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