RaveAstra... a scabbed-over wound. Its beauty and meaning — which are considerable — come from the tension between the diary’s immediacy, candor, and occasional luridness, against its intellectual heft as an artifact documenting Ernaux’s artistic process. Getting Lost marries the high with the low, the petty with the sacred, the cerebral with the profane, in an exhilarating descent into abject desire ... There is a feverish clarity to Getting Lost, a sense of writing through rather than about ... The repetition is relentless and hypnotic, sometimes verging on dull, but her awareness of it never falters. She at times reduces her themes to shorthand, perhaps as bored as a reader might be, tersely recording \'Love/death, but oh so intense.\' The shortcuts only draw the reader in deeper, allowing Ernaux’s voice and fixations to echo in one’s head ... From the repetition and occasional artlessness emerge surprises. I don’t think it’s crass to acknowledge the thrill of reading Ernaux’s frank accounts of sex, which range from sensual to amusing ... There’s both eroticism and a kind of dry humor in the way she documents the sex ... There’s no performance to the sex scenes in Getting Lost, as the diarist has nothing to prove and no one to entertain. Nothing about them feels fake, and therefore nothing about them feels embarrassing ... But while the book might be erotic, it’s never anything so dull as romantic. This is a real-time account of an abject, obsessive love affair that is consistently clear-eyed and even objective in the author’s understanding of her lover’s flaws and the limits of her own feeling ... These revelations are possible because the genre of the diary is entirely lacking in modesty ... it’s Ernaux’s reflections on her writing that emerge as the most potent thrill ... The unselfconsciousness of ego, the transparency, the casual claim of perfection — where does anyone get to write like this except in their diary? Especially, let’s be frank, a woman? This is perhaps the true exhilaration of Getting Lost, moreso than its wit or sordidness. It’s an unmediated glimpse into how the author relates to her literary output, pride and disappointment dispatched matter-of-factly, nothing hidden or demurred or merely implied. No false modesty. No modesty at all. Here is what she thinks of herself ... The focus on the personal, though, can result in a kind of airlessness. In all these thoughts, desires, memories, and dreams (which are recounted frequently, both more interesting than they ought to be and less compelling than they need to be), where are the rooms? The expressions? The hand gestures, the city streets, the half-drunk coffees in chipped cups? Are we to be trapped for 240 pages in a psychic spiral of repeated abstractions? Ernaux is aware of this lack of anchoring physical detail, and at one point mourns it ... Characteristically, though, the humor of the diagnostic quip almost makes up for the stretches that drag. Ernaux is incapable of writing a bad sentence, even if the book’s language trends toward the quotidian. She remains lucid and witty even in the most dashed-off entries ... Still, when beauty occurs, it feels like a miracle ... Perhaps this is the true joy of Getting Lost: the fictionalized version of the affair might be tighter and more polished — more tempered — but it cannot produce the same sense of active, immediate, unmitigated creation.
Sally Rooney
MixedSoft Punk MagazineBeautiful World is a sweeping novel about devoted interpersonal attachment and the contours of a good life ... There are good lines and good sex scenes, good jokes, good observations. The problem with the book isn’t the emphasis on the erotic or the familiarity of the subject matter ... The problem is that, in a novel that purportedly makes the case for serious, engaged writing about compelling characters in believably messy relationships, Rooney has failed to give us any ... Beautiful World, Where Are You is more stylistically playful than its predecessors, less so on the line level than in its approach to narration.
