Arun Sharma
Annie Ernaux’s (Nobel prize winner 2022) book, “Getting Lost,” is compilation of her diary entries from 1988 through 1990. Mostly it’s a detailed graphic narration of her torrid sexual affair in Paris with a married man, S, a fifteen years younger Soviet diplomat when she is about fifty years old. “S is slim, soft and tall; has green eyes and light brown hair.” She craves his submission and softness but always desires a steamy, sensual romance and feels intense attraction for this younger man.
The sex is passionate, obsessive and graphic. “I realized that I’d lost a contact lens, I found it on his pen..(male organ)” The bedroom romantic scenes are intensely visual “S and I throw ourselves at each other”; “my face bruised and blotched with kisses”; “three times in four hours”; “there isn’t much left of the Kama Sutra for us to do”, “I want to keep a G-string soaked with his sperm under my pillow. The bulk of “Getting Lost” is Ernaux’s desire for him and agony as she impatiently waits for his return and fear of losing him.
“He wears designer suits but his choice of underwear, cheap Russian tighty-whities, is poignant. When drunk, he talks about Stalin. He likes the dumbest game shows. Maybe he’s K.G.B. He does not know how to unfasten garters. “Kissing S” reminds “being kissed at age 18.” He gives back “my 20-year-old self.”
Craving for intense physical pleasure tingled with an obsessive passion she recounts of being tired and lethargic from marathon sex and thus useless for work (“Intense desire keeps me from working”). This affair has also resulted in another book Simple Passion, a novel-like memoir.
Ankita Chakraborty in Guardian has compared her book with classics like Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary: “Ernaux’s affair should be counted as one of the great liaisons of literature. She writes honest, deeply felt books. Her subversion is not simply the subversion of gender – a woman writing about her own affair, which was historically the dominion of men – but her sexual frankness. The quality that distinguishes Ernaux’s writing on sex from others in her milieu is the total absence of shame.” Clearly, it’s only a myth that passionate sexual obsession is only in the minds of men.
The romance was driven, on Ernaux’s part, by a pursuit of perfection, she sought to recreate – “the first night in Leningrad again and again.” For the Russian S, Ernaux was winning a famous writer and streamy, juicy sex along with his favorite packets of Marlboro cigarettes to take home and expensive vodka and whisky to enjoy and the available romantic escapades. Silence from him is inferred by her as the end of relationship she always craves and foments. “That’s it,” she writes in numerous entries, “it’s over.” A constant fear of being dumped frustrates and torments her.
It’s a pure lust she wants to cultivate, continue and hope to grow. “You feel as if her heart is in your hands. She desires him everywhere, every hour of the day, in every country she visits. She buys herself new clothes; she runs errands for him (“I’m both mother and whore”) and admits to “vivid sex dreams.”
The Russian has no physical presence in Paris, except when he’s in Ernaux’s bed. His entire personality could be summed up thus: “He f..ks. He drinks vodka. He talks about Stalin.” His presence is more psychological, felt abundantly at the mention of the word “call”. Almost all the entries have that word. “Why doesn’t he call? Desire in her brings forth more desire, the impulse of death, happiness, and even past trauma, like her abortion, but never humiliation. Getting Lost also has some of the most explicit descriptions of oral sex that I have read. Ernaux intends it to be a love story from the beginning, but it’s not. Instead, it’s a study of a woman at her peak desire. The story of a woman in the 20th century who has lived fully, sought out pain and happiness equally and then committed her findings truthfully on paper. Her life is our inheritance.” Ankita comments.
Dwight Garner in New York Times recounts other female writer’s passionate affairs with younger men such as Colette, in “Chéri, wrote lucidly, and charmingly, about an older woman’s liaison with a younger man. The English writer Angela Carter described her relationship, when she was in her 30s, with a 19-year-old.”
Getting Lost is all about torrid passions, “the naked physical desire, raw and juicy graphic male body contacts. She talks about her diaries that there is “something raw and dark, without salvation, a kind of oblation.”
“This book is an anthology of her projected anxieties. Her heart is some sort of nocturnal beast, caught by her own tripwire and camera. There no future, other than the date of our next meeting.” It’s a point she makes repeatedly.
Her journal and writing in it, “was a way of enduring the wait until we saw each other again, of heightening the pleasure by recording the words and acts of passion. Most of all, it was a way to save life, save from nothingness the thing that most resembles it.”
Annie abundantly makes very clear that both sex and writing are her only goals in her life.
Ernaux dissects herself: “I How fundamental is writing to Ernaux’s personality? Well, she forgave her former husband’s infidelity — they were separated before her affair with the Russian began — on the grounds that he couldn’t write and was thus, in some senses, crippled. “What else is there to do when you don’t write?” she asks. “Eat, drink and make love.” But that’s what exactly she is doing beside writing!”
It’s all about just “A man and woman meet from time to time to just sleep together. I’m in love without living.”
Dwight Garner in New York Times, succinctly concludes: “Getting Lost” is a feverish book. It’s about being impaled by desire, and about the things human beings want, as opposed to the things for which they settle.”
Getting Lost is a book about a female’s (writer’s) physical desire and craving for a male body, filled with fear, frustration and hope for its continuity. As she herself mentions, it could have been written by a “23 years old”, or even an 18-years-old, due to the intense craving for primal physical pleasure at its peaks and the lows experienced as valleys.
“All the power of the attachment that binds me to him may lie in his secretiveness, his unpredictability, his “foreignness”’(page 106).
In few words “Getting Lost” is about the power of primal sex and the power of writing!
(Arun Sharma is an Engineer and writer with seven published books.)
