The Possession

Ilse

Rating: really liked it
The other woman



The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city, the whole world, with a person you have never met.

When a friend who was reading this book recently posted this quote, I knew this brief book would become my first foray into the work of Annie Ernaux. Insecurity, uncertainty, low self-esteem, a brain working on perpetual overtime, generating new scenario’s endlessly, a mind filling in the blanks and giving disconcerting answers, the threat of the unknown– as it seemed I was losing myself in a maelstrom of emotions I didn’t recognize or understand, I was randomly looking for an anchor, perhaps a second opinion on a self-diagnosis in fiction dealing with jealously, wondering (and still not sure) if that was the name for the feelings of restlessness, sorrow and anxiety which were tormenting me at that moment, gliding into an interior state in which my mind seemed completely taken over by my imagination, insomnia included.

As a quick search bringing forth this list left me somewhat dissatisfied, the emergence on my radar of this book on the obsession of a woman on the new woman in the life of her ex seemed eerily timely. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it as an brilliant study through self-analysis of the devastating power of this kind of thoughts and emotions from a female perspective.

I was no longer free in my daydreams. I was no longer the subject even of my own fantasies. I was being inhabited by a woman I had never seen.

After she has left her lover W., the narrator gets entirely obsessed by the new woman in his life, trying to track her like a detective with the few clues that her ex discloses on her in their on-going encounters, investigating the pieces on her life which she carefully extorts from him and which enable her to go on building her own imaginary castles of mental torture.

For the first time, I could clearly perceive the material nature of feelings and emotions – I physically felt their consistency, their form but also their independence, their perfect freedom with respect to my consciousness.

In this succinct, raw and uncomfortably intense analysis the narrator dissects how she gets occupied by and eventually frees herself from emotions so awkward and humiliating one would prefer to hide them from the outside world as one is hardly able to admit them to oneself - her writing helping her to transform them and stop the new woman from taking possession of her thoughts. Noticing that her standards on behaviour she previously would have ridiculed or denounced are shifting, the narrator gradually becomes aware that the irrationality of her thoughts and emotions is barely tolerable and destructive, realising in the end they are especially self-destructive.

I beg to differ with Ernaux’s assertion that the Other is the main source of our suffering as well as of our happiness. L’enfer, c’est les autres? No, this kind of suffering is deeply rooted in ourselves and our own issues, it is a kind of suffering which is self-inflicted and cannot be cured but by calling your mind to order (hard as such is). I was surprised by that statement, as throughout her entire discourse Ernaux seems to illustrate how it is your own mind which can be your worst enemy, in this matter making you suffer more than a person’s real acts can do. Which doesn’t mean the narrator’s suffering, nor her feelings of powerlessness against the other’s woman’s existence or her feelings of inferiority can be simply solved by denying them, therefore their impact is all too real and fragilizing her identity: In the self-erasure that is the state of jealously, which transforms every difference into a lack , it was not only my body, my face, that were devaluated but also my occupation – my entire being.



Like people made fragile by disease or depression, I was an echo chamber for all pain everywhere.

A dark, at times brutal, unsettling and fascinating descent into the convoluted human mind and heart.

(pictures by Gary Isaacs)

Roman Clodia

Rating: really liked it

Ce n'est plus mon désir, ma jalousie, qui sont dans ces pages, c'est du désir, de la jalousie.

It is no longer my desire, my jealousy which is in these pages, it's desire, jealousy.

For all its brevity, Ernaux's meditation on jealousy when her lover leaves her for another woman is both intense and also coolly analytical. The narrator inhabits the body and consciousness of the jealous subject and yet is also watching 'her', her writer's brain fascinated by the psychological disruption and dislocation that has a rational woman descend into a fevered craziness that is eminently recognisable.

That 'l'occupation' of the title figures both the feeling of possession, of having been overtaken by an obsession from outside onself, but also the 'occupation' of the writer who views emotional turmoil as prime material for copy - confession, performance and spectacle all rolled up into one blazing, searing, self-conscious text.

Jenny (Reading Envy)

Rating: really liked it
"The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city - the whole world - with a person you may never have met."

Annie Ernaux is on my list of authors to try, and when Seven Stories Press had a sale last year I bought The Years plus a few slim novels that are more like individual short stories. This is a short one about the narrator's obsession over her lover's new woman. Basically she left her longterm relationship to be with him, but then was hesitant to settle down right away, so he went in another direction. So she doesn't want him, but it drives her crazy that this other woman is closer than she is. It's more like the jealousy is of the thing she doesn't want, which tracks.

Dave Schaafsma

Rating: really liked it
I am reading and reviewing quickly a series of short works by Annie Ernaux. Memoir? Autofiction? I had just read Simple Passion about being possessed by all of the emotions Ernaux experiences as a young woman in a two-year affair with a married man; Possession continues the theme, only focused on post-relationship (another, different relationship than the one described in Simple Passion) jealousy. Both experiences she describes in these short books are debilitating, crazy-making, self-defeating in so many ways. So Simple Passion is about the all-consuming experience of desire; Possession is about the all-consuming experience of jealousy.

"The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city - the whole world - with a person you may never have met."

The guy Ernaux is seeing begins seeing another woman, and Ernaux ends the relationship, but then can’t stop thinking of the woman who has in some sense “replaced” her.

“In the self-erasure that is the state of jealousy, which transforms every difference into a lack, it was not only my body, my face, that were devalued but also my occupation – my entire being.”

Many women describe these books as capturing these experiences from a female perspective, and I am sure this is true, but I can say I could relate to them very easily as a man. I know very well the emotions she describes, acknowledging that societally there my be or certainly have been different stakes in these experiences for men than women. But importantly, Ernaux is looking back half a century at her young self, in a different time.

Erin E. Barrio

Rating: really liked it
The first time I read The Possession in a Women's Literature course during my undergrad, I took it for granted. Mistaking it for a quick read by the book's size, I blazed through, broadly grasping themes of jealousy, desire, and course possession. But I did not sit with the book long enough to soak in the feeling behind Ernaux's words.

Just as the narrator states,"It is no longer my desire, my jealousy, in these pages- it is of desire, of jealousy; I am working in invisible things" (39), Ernaux taps into the inner workings of possession in a way that transcends the plot of a jealous ex-lover. Instead, The Possession contemplates the freedom of the fevered mind, unbound to norms, social expectations, and accepted behavior. As Ernaux masterfully illustrates, one possessed, operates outside these conventions, listening and acting from a clear and coursing yearning for overcoming the 'Other', new partner.

Not to be fooled as a 'light' read, The Possession will pull you in with it's raw, honest writing and sparse descriptive style.

Rosemarie Donzanti

Rating: really liked it
A very short but intense novel that goes deep into the author’s obsession with her former lover’s new partner. She is completely overcome with jealousy and can think of nothing except discovering who this woman is and inflicting her overwhelming emotional pain on her. Ernaux’s writing had me mesmerized. Her overpowering compulsive emotion and soul crushing fixation had me feeling her acute internal destruction. This book is raw, real and very well written. The author does a great job portraying how downright terrifying jealousy can be to the individual who experiences it and potentially the target if it spirals out of control. A decadent read that can be deliciously devoured in one sitting with one, maybe two, glasses of wine 🍷.

“The strangest thing about jealousy is that it can populate an entire city, the whole world, with a person you have never met.”
Annie Ernaux - The Possession

Rebecka

Rating: really liked it
Short and concise, just like everything else by Ernaux. She does really hang on to certain themes, but it's always so well written that it hardly matters.

———-
Edit after having re-read it in 2022: Ernaux is the master of articulating painful feelings. I’ve never read an author who is so spot on with her descriptions.

tee

Rating: really liked it
3.5? my second ernaux, and now i believe that i like her enough to have a copy of my next read by her (the years) on my shelf <3 an unravelling of her intense feelings of jealousy and bad coping mechanisms post a breakup, this book was raw and unflinching—very on brand with the styles i now associate with her. as is with any work of translation, i wish i could have read this in the language it was originally written, but oh well. would recommend if you’re looking for uncensored account of obsession!

“it seemed to me that to put a name to this woman would allow me to construct, out of what is always awakened by a word and its sounds, a personality type: to hold an image of her—even if a completely false one—inside me. to know the name of the other woman was, in my own deficiency of being, to own a little part of her.”

Cherise Wolas

Rating: really liked it
I came across an article that mentioned French writer Annie Ernaux, who I'd not heard of. I did not know she's long been recognized as one of France’s leading contemporary authors, and is now in her late 70s, and finally receiving the international recognition she deserves. This is the first work of hers that I've read. Barely a novella, at 62 pages, it's a brief and intense first-person narrative. Is the "I" Ernaux, or a character invented by the writer? Is it fiction, creative nonfiction, what today is now called auto-fiction? I don't know, but I read it quickly and was intrigued by the voice, by the straightforward prose, by the look into one's self when jealousy is at issue. In the book, the narrator has left her younger lover, but when she learns he has moved in with another woman, her own older age (47), it sets off a conflagration in her. I think she has written 16 other novels, most translated into English, and I am now on an Ernaux reading kick.

Martyn

Rating: really liked it
Quite simply truthful. It's amazing just how much personal feeling Ernaux can put across in so short a novel, astounding honesty and clarity. It also reminded me of the kinds inner turmoil that I have suffered from in the past. A wonderful book.

M. Sarki

Rating: really liked it
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.

Robb Claravall

Rating: really liked it
‘Writing has been a way to save that which is no longer my reality—a sensation seizing me from head to foot, in the street—but has become "the possession", a period of time, circumscribed and completed.’

What a phenomenal work. Spent the entirety of last night reading through and finishing this (though it can certainly be conquered in just one sitting).

We relinquish our own suffering by imagining our lives in the bodies and hence suffering of others we dare fantasize about. In this shared space of universal pain, we cease that of which is personal and subjugate our emotions under a purely intelligible, intellectual light. Our suffering becomes ‘a’ suffering, and our torment—which was once unbearable—becomes nondescript once viewed under the scrupulous eye of a person other than our own. The naked singularity of our suffering is transformed into a separate entity of its unique undoing, and it is our choice to choose whether or not we affiliate ourselves under the influence of its evil spell, and if not, we determine whether we can simply gaze unto the eyes of this strange beast while understanding the features that make up its ghastly countenance (which Ernaux aims to objectively document through her writings)—this is stoicism rewritten and regained. We do not feel pain; rather, pain possesses us—and we are simply its unwilling host, waiting for that moment of exorcism to arrive. Absolutely brilliant.

Delia

Rating: really liked it
I don't know if it is because Audible only had this in English and the narrator sounded bitchy and annoying, but this is the Annie Ernaux novel I've liked the least so far. And I LOVE Annie Ernaux, I know she is an excellent writer, I've read all her novels in the original French (that I've read so far) except for this one and I always thought that in English it didn't sound as good. I could catch glimpses of her brilliance but I am sure this novel in French was so much better. I should read it in French one day.

Ivy-Mabel Fling

Rating: really liked it
My first experience of Annie Ernaux but it will not be my last! This brief novella is a magnificent study of coping (or perhaps not coping) with jealousy when one has been abandoned by a partner. Brilliant!

Julia

Rating: really liked it
Am now on an eternal quest to come across a piece of work from Ernaux that I *don’t* thoroughly enjoy.