... 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.

The journal is relentless in its presentation of her pain and abasement, but no less so in its effort to dissect what just happened. Here is the same deep probing for truth, the same fanatical quest for self-awareness to be found in all Ernaux’s work ... Like most diaries—and quite unlike Ernaux’s usual meticulously concise prose—Getting Lost contains its share of banalities, messy thoughts, inconsistencies, and unpolished sentences. It is often repetitious, and accounts of Ernaux’s dreams are no more exciting to hear about than anyone else’s ever are. But, to echo James Wood’s observation about reading Karl Ove Knausgaard—another writer consumed with his own intimate history—even when I was bored I was interested ... What is remarkable—and what, for me, makes her work more engaging than much contemporary autofiction is her ability to appear removed from her first-person narratives, to be writing objectively about her subjectivity, achieving transparency and, at the same time, an almost forensic detachment ... as a matador-writer Ernaux has always faced the bull’s horns. She is a master of close and graceful capework, and, as in any bullfight, it is the show of courage before danger and possible disaster that enthralls the spectator.

The sex is torrid, and described with a lemony eye for detail ... The almost primitive directness of her voice is bracing. It’s as if she’s carving each sentence onto the surface of a table with a knife. She is, in her writing, definitely not the sort of girl whose bicycle has a basket ... Not tweaked in postproduction ... The bedroom scenes are bulldozing ... This book is an anthology of her projected anxieties. Her heart is some sort of nocturnal beast ... 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. Is it a major book? Probably not. But it’s one of those books about loneliness that, on every page, makes you feel less alone.

To read Ernaux often feels this way: in her exhaustive reckonings with her own life, one finds a search for lost time that exposes the unstable bounds and incoherencies of meaning in our own narratives of its passing. In a moment, as Ernaux has written, when technology and socio-digital media have rendered the 'obscurity of previous centuries' obsolete and made it so that those of us still living are beginning to be 'resurrected ahead of time,' her meticulous campaign of recording a 'total novel' of life imagines narrative beyond the vicissitudes of temporality, deliberately attendant to the unreliable, stuttering nature of remembrance. Ernaux imparts on her reader a sense that memory, like any other knowledge system, is an infinitely changeable field, one given astonishing density by, but not reducible to, the individual experience ... This is the disarming closeness one encounters when brushing up against her work. Though oriented through the needle’s eye of her particular world, her nearly sociological sensibility and investment in generating collective feeling dress her accounts of one woman’s life in uncanny familiarity ... The scope of Getting Lost is narrow, utterly transfixed by events of an intimate order. These intimacies become a kind of mythos, hyper-saturated, as if passion were being presented to Ernaux in Technicolor for the very first time ... From these humble beginnings, then, Ernaux’s unabashed delight in her own corporeality and the decadent descriptions of her pleasure in Getting Lost appear as insurgent thrills ... That we again face an era when the gains of feminist and sexual liberationist movements are being reactionarily regressed, Ernaux’s erotic manifesto—and her radical exhortation of the value of foregrounding women’s personal narratives in a public and political context—has perhaps never been more essential in relation to ongoing demands for bodily integrity and autonomy.

The comparatively shapeless entries show up the tension Ms. Ernaux feels between distillation and comprehensiveness. She labors to create small, perfectly measured narratives, but, as she comments in Getting Lost, 'a story is never finished' ... Armed with her usual penetrating and aptly chosen descriptions, Ms. Ernaux progresses from the rustic war period to the material explosion during the Trente Glorieuses to the 1968 rebellions to the ambivalent liberalizations of the 1980s, and onward to the 21st century. As Ms. Ernaux’s experiences become reduced in the solvent of time, the pointed, intimate details drawn from them gain autonomy and can be claimed by anyone. 'Other people’s memories gave us a place in the world,' she writes, and it is to the service of that process of orientation and self-knowledge that her highly original books have been devoted.

Her emblematic style best mirrors the nature of an affair. Her prose is restrained, yet intense. By deliberately removing her subjectivity, she elevates her obsession to the level of melodrama. A conceit in service of the writing itself ... Rather than seek to construct a love story from her affair with S, Ernaux indulges in her own agony, observing and revering it as one might a divine test. The affair is less about S’s subjectivity and more about her desire to chase the exacting character of emotion ... It is Ernaux’s writing in Getting Lost that best approximates the tumultuous nature of an affair. Ernaux’s entries exist in the excruciating present, in the agony of uncertainty. The intimacy of a journal allows her to indulge in her desire devoid of any shame ... She begins to narrativize her life in real time, rather than mining her life for narrative retrospectively. The writing becomes inextricable with her passion, the process lays itself out over her daily life and she becomes just a character ... At times, Ernaux’s diary entries grow tiring in their melodrama ... She is simply committed to her emotional vulnerability and beholden to her impulsivity.

Ernaux’s penetrating gaze in Getting Lost excavates something crucial in her passion’s source — a fascination with Soviet culture. Today, as Vladimir Putin exhibits Russian militarism’s appalling face, this Russophilia makes poignant if troubling reading. Secretive, aggressive, and macho, Soviet culture attracts and appalls Ernaux in equal measure. At the same time, watching a skilled writer who was for years overlooked by the French literary establishment salvage an affair shrouded in such secrecy is to witness a literary feat ... These diary snippets weave a terrifying dynamic between S’s presence and absence and seem to go on forever, suffocating the reader.

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 ... She is on her knees from the first page, in the throes of a lust she wants to cultivate and grow. You feel as if her heart is in your hands ... The quality that distinguishes Ernaux’s writing on sex from others in her milieu is the total absence of shame ... Simple Passion was a cleverly crafted memoir; Getting Lost is a large chunk of her life and the more interesting version of the affair.

She documents these experiences with unemotional precision, ruthlessly covering such private subjects because, as she explains in L’événement, she would otherwise be 'guilty of silencing the lives of women and condoning a world governed by the patriarchy' ... not the diary entries of Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic; those emphatic aphorisms on the nature of existence and the intellectual benefits of suffering. No, here is an unfiltered look into the mind of a woman capable of a deep obsession ... If the paintings of Renoir could speak, it would be through these diaries ... Between the stripped-down sentences, she allows herself to acknowledge that something as simple as sex has destroyed her ... It’s not a typical story, even for Ernaux, perhaps because most others have too much pride to publish such unfiltered thoughts. In this way, the book’s greatest weakness—its self-indulgence—is also its greatest strength.

... mostly she describes herself waiting in agony for him to arrive, then lamenting his departure and fretting that the affair is over until his next call ... In between she describes her dreams, which are not interesting ... Ernaux is your boring friend who can’t stop asking you when you think he’s going to text and what his last message could possibly have meant. It’s a diary, so it’s necessarily shapeless: the hunks of greasy wool that she would so expertly weave into the beautiful objet of Simple Passion. Perhaps diehard fans will welcome this addition to the canon, but I couldn’t help wishing Getting Lost had stayed in the archive. If you’re new to her work, start elsewhere.

... uncharacteristically long for an Ernaux-book, fuller if not necessarily richer. Where her novels (or novellas or memoirs or whatever one wants to call them) tend towards the almost stark and simple, Getting Lost is expansive -- the events drawn-out, lingering, inescapable, the frequent repetitions making it realistic in a different way ... resembles nothing so much as a a lovelorn teen's Angst-ridden diary. Obsessive, tear-stained, intimate, it is dominated by emotion -- yet much of it is cooly and succinctly observed. It is an interesting yet unsettling read.

Entrancing ... Ernaux’s writing is astonishingly candid as she illustrates the ways loss, heartache, and love intersect with her craft as a writer ... Fans will relish every scintillating detail.