Passion simple
Signed presentation inscription: “À Sylvie Genevoix, en témoignage de profonde estime, ce petit livre qui essaie de dire la réalité d'une passion. Annie Ernaux. 6/01/92.”
“Since September of last year, I have done nothing but wait for a man: for him to telephone me and come to my apartment.” For several months — after which she began writing this book — Annie Ernaux lived through a consuming affair with A., a married man living abroad.
Clear, hard, brief sentences, without compromise or concession. As Josyane Savigneau wrote in Le Monde (17 January 1992): “No guilt, and that is precisely what is unsettling. No hysteria, no staging. Simply the calm resolve to write the truth of her passion, even where it upsets common assumptions… Annie Ernaux, even in a very short text, even in a first-person account of something she herself lived through, says only one thing: that she is a writer.”
A good copy with a fine provenance: Sylvie Genevoix.
A discreet but influential literary figure, Genevoix, after studying classics at the Sorbonne, began a career in publishing. She started at Plon as a press officer for the 10/18 imprint, then coordinated the literary departments at Plon-Perrin-Julliard, later becoming literary director at Julliard. From 1992 to 2005 she was literary director at Albin Michel, before being appointed to the Conseil supérieur de l’audiovisuel (CSA), where she worked on the development of local television and the accessibility of programs for disabled viewers; she also chaired the CSA’s Mission langue française et francophonie. She grew up at Les Vernelles, the family home acquired by her father Maurice Genevoix in 1927, where she developed a deep attachment to the Loire and to family memory, which she later evoked in La Maison de mon père (2001).