Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022
‘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 for The 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.
‘Annie Ernaux manifestly believes in the liberating force of writing. Her work is uncompromising and written in plain language, scraped clean. And when she with great courage and clinical acuity reveals the agony of the experience of class, describing shame, humiliation, jealousy or inability to see who you are, she has achieved something admirable and enduring.’
— Anders Olsson, chair of the Nobel Committee
‘Ernaux writes not in the heat of desire but in retrospect. The translation by Anna Moschovakis is chicly austere. Like concrete poetry, small paragraphs sit adrift on the page; the text is as unmoored as our protagonist…. While she dances on the edge of insanity, she revels in the pain of feeling alive. Being numb is worse than being in agony.’
— Genevieve Gaunt, The Spectator
‘The most intimate human experiences – grief, greed, fear, sickness and lust, along with other kinds of private “primordial savagery” – are laid bare throughout the prolific French author’s works, sometimes in shudderingly explicit detail, and The Possession is no exception…. Far from seeming dated, this tiny tome is even more pertinent in our digital age … capturing the exact feeling brought on by a social media algorithm producing the precise thing you want to ignore.’
— Ceci Browning, The Times
‘Raw and resonant, Annie Ernaux’s newly translated novella The Possession offers up a stream of fixations and divulgences that the narrator treats with utmost openness…. Ernaux creates a voyeuristic world that briefly but totally immerses readers and shares a piece of herself through the primary emotion that drives this book: jealousy…. Through a stream of confessions and recollections, Ernaux weaves experiences of obsession, addiction and insecurity into the human fabric of being.’
— Maria Farsoon, The Skinny
