The Possession by Annie Ernaux and Anna Moschovakis (translator)
| The Possession by Annie Ernaux and Anna Moschovakis (translator) | |
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| Category: Autobiography | |
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Reviewer: Heather Magee
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| Summary: Practically weightless, this slender volume is not engaging because of its brevity; it captivates readers due to its frankness and confessional tone which nonetheless feels almost didactic. It is this combination of personal and impersonal notes which makes it sing. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 48 | Date: May 2025 |
| Publisher: Fitzcarraldo Editions | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1804271490 | |
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Ernaux opens with a disclaimer, warning readers that what follows is more or less a confession: I have always wanted to write as if I would be gone when the book was published. Towards the end of the book, she claims that the title (somewhat enigmatic at first) bares witness to a brief period of time in her life, labelled and documented here as The Possession, in which she felt herself in the throes of an all-encompassing and seductive jealousy targeted at the new partner of W, a man she has since separated from after a six-year long affair.
The careful and meticulous tracking of her own avaricious quest for knowledge about this other woman represents, as eighty-four year old Ernaux tells her reader, only a portion of her long life. This temporal parentheses might explain its compartmentalisation into such a concentrated and compact bind of pages. It need not be longer; the words capture something like an anatomy of jealousy in its completeness, peering into the irises of the green-eyed monster, and attempting to understand it. As Ernaux herself reflects, to give a title to moments of one's life [...] is perhaps a way to master them?
Within these pages, Ernaux exhibits all the hallmarks - even the violent imaginings - of an obsessed stalker, and yet, her desires and her actions always feel explicable, even justified. Much like Ernaux's own experience under the dark spell of jealousy, the reader, too, flits from I could never do that to I could see myself doing that. After all, the title of this work is not My Possession or Your Possession; it is The Possession - the indefinite article serves as proof of its universality - the undiscriminating power of a predator over its prey.
This state of jealousy led Ernaux into the realm of paranoia; she began to invent scenarios, oscillating between the theatre of the imagination and the theatre of real life. She speaks of her body and mind being devoured, erased (jealousy as self-erasure), devalued; she compares herself to a pervert - all in the (selfless?) pursuit of anatomising this jealousy which took root within her.
Though, Ernaux is refreshingly honest when she admits that she was not entirely a victim of this jealousy she found herself living with. This period of time, she recalls, placed her outside of the grip of life's usual mediocrity. She would relieve her own pain by imagining that of her female foe.
Some of my favourite sections contemplated the role of writing among all this, never more powerfully than when she compares writing itself to a form of jealousy: a jealousy of the real - this sentence gave me goosebumps.
I adore Ernaux's writing, and appreciate this plunge into the self which, no matter how exaggerated it may seem, simply portrays the range of human emotion and delusion in tandem. For more of Annie Ernaux's work, read A Woman's Story, which is her fascinating memoir.
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