The Possession

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Description

'The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city - the whole world - with a person you may never have met.' These words set the framework forThe Possession, a striking portrait of a woman after a love affair has ended. Annie Ernaux pulls the reader through every step of jealousy, of a woman's need to know who has replaced her in a lost beloved's life. Ernaux's writing, characteristically gorgeous in its precision, depicts the all too familiar human tendency to seek control and certainty after rejection.

Reviews

Reading her is like getting to know a friend, the way they tell you about themselves over long conversations that sometimes take years, revealing things slowly, looping back to some parts of their life over and over, hardly mentioning others.
Joanna Biggs,London Review of Books

AnnieErnauxis one of my favourite contemporary writers, original and true. Always after reading one of her books, I walk around in her world for months.
Sheila Heti, author ofAlphabetical Diaries

Ernauxhas inherited de Beauvoirs role of chronicler to a generation.
Margaret Drabble,New Statesman

Across the ample particularities of over forty years and twenty-one books, almost all short, subject-driven memoirs,Ernauxhas fundamentally destabilized and reinvented the genre in French literature.
Audrey Wollen,The Nation

I find her work extraordinary.
Eimear McBride, author ofA Girl is a Half-Formed Thing

Annie Ernaux writes like no other of how jealousy brings us face to face with a doppelgnger that lives the life we think we should be living.In its searing exploration of jealousys assault on sanity and identity, The Possession frees us from the shame and isolation of our own obsessions.
Terri Apter, author of Difficult Mothers

Author Bio

Born in 1940,AnnieErnauxgrew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she wasaprofessor at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particularAMan's PlaceandAWoman'sStory, have become contemporary classics in France. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Anna Moschovakis is a poet, novelist and translator. She is the author of the novelsAn Earthquake Is a Shaking of the Surface of the Earth,ParticipationandEleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love. Her translation of David Diop's novelAt Night All Blood Is Blackwon the 2021 International Booker Prize. She has also translated Albert Cossery'sThe Jokers, Annie Ernaux'sThe Possession,Bresson on Bresson, and (with Christine Schwartz-Harley) Marcelle Sauvageot'sCommentary.