Customer Reviews

The Possession

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Precise, exact writing about jealousy and obssession after the end of a love affair. Ernaux excells at writing about the human experience in the most concise language imaginable. Powerful work. A quick, but long-contemplated, read.

In 62 pages of controlled, polished, very intelligent prose, Annie Ernaux recounts, in the words of her narrator, "an exercise in the abandonment of intelligence." I say 'recounts' with a certain hesitation, because, as with all of Ernaux's novels, it is unclear to what extent The Possession is autobiographical. Not that it matters.

The first-person narrator has broken off her relationship with her lover and is immediately occupied, in the double sense of both 'preoccupied' and 'possessed,' by the idea of the woman who has taken her place. Unable to extract information from the man, she becomes obsessed with uncovering the identity of his new lover.

One does not have the sense that, by learning about the new woman, the narrator hopes to gain some crucial insight into herself. Rather, she is at the mercy of this double occupation, and must simply live through it, like a woman who must watch to the end a play she neither likes nor understands, but feels, against any real likelihood of success, she must decipher. As the narrator says, "In the state I was in, of uncertainty and the need to know, the most tangential clues could become brutally relevant. My talent for connecting the most disparate facts into a relation of cause and effect was prodigious."

There is present a third occupation, that of the author, Annie Ernaux, by language and the process of writing. In her earlier novel, Passion Perfect, it occurs to the narrator that writing should aim for "the impression conveyed by sexual intercourse, a feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgement." This seems a fitting description of the dilemma and intent of The Possession.