Book 100 - There Was Suffering

Title: The Possession (L'occupation)

Author: Annie Ernaux

Genre: short memoir? psychological fiction? hard to tell...

Whatever genre this falls into, it's a goddamn rollercoaster. Ernaux's almost clinical dissection of her experience of all facets of jealousy - the psychological, behavioural, and physical - is engrossing, and somehow also full of passion and vigour and energy. There's enough space between the speaker and the content for the reader to slip in, but not too much that the fire behind the words is sapped away.

Ernaux captures what it's like to latch on to someone or something almost inexplicably, and obsess. The comparing, the conjecturing, the scenes played over and over behind your eyes...

"There was suffering, on the one hand; and on the other, a mind incapable of applying itself to anything but the testimony and analysis of that suffering"

Yeah, she gets it.

Rating: 🍓🍓🍓🍓 / 5