The Possession

Written by Annie Ernaux

Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

This poignant memoir explores the self-fulfillment possible when we examine ourselves in the aftermath of a love affair, even through the eyes of the lost beloved.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dreamscape Media
• Release date: Nov 5, 2019
• ISBN: 9781666557497

Annie Ernaux

Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  

Reviews for The Possession

[melnicolai · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In 62 pages of controlled, polished, very intelligent prose, Annie Ernaux recounts, in the words of her narrator, “an exercise in the abandonment of intelligence.” I say ‘recounts’ with a certain hesitation, because, as with all of Ernaux’s novels, it is unclear to what extent The Possession is autobiographical. Not that it matters.The first-person narrator has broken off her relationship with her lover and is immediately occupied, in the double sense of both ‘preoccupied’ and ‘possessed,’ by the idea of the woman who has taken her place. Unable to extract information from the man, she becomes obsessed with uncovering the identity of his new lover. By learning about this woman, the narrator is not hoping to gain some crucial insight into herself. Rather, she is at the mercy of this double occupation, and must simply live through it, like a woman who must watch to the end a play she neither likes nor understands, but feels, against any real likelihood of success, she must decipher. As the narrator says, “In the state I was in, of uncertainty and the need to know, the most tangential clues could become brutally relevant. My talent for connecting the most disparate facts into a relation of cause and effect was prodigious.”There is a third occupation, that of the author, Annie Ernaux, by language and the process of writing. In her earlier novel, Passion Perfect, it occurs to the narrator that writing should aim for “the impression conveyed by sexual intercourse, a feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgement.” This seems a fitting description of the dilemma and intent of The Possession.

[msarki_3 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Time marches on. Facades are rebuilt and sometimes returned to splendor. But not always, as nothing, ever, remains the same. The pain of jealousy proven again by another to be both delicious and unnerving.