Getting Lost by Annie Ernaux

This is the first thing that I have read by this author, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, and is best know for her personal memory works. I liked it but I did not love it, and I could not relate to it. That is unusual for me, as at least part of the pleasure for me in reading a memoir is in how it gets me to reflecting on my personal experience, and how does the author's thoughts and happenings interweave--or not--with me and my experiences. This is the focus of this work: in 1988, she went on a junket to Soviet Russia. On the last day of the tour, in then Leningrad, she began an affair with a married Russian diplomat from the Soviet embassy in France. He was 35; she was 48. When they returned to Paris they kept it up. This is the billed as the unaltered, original journal of her obsession that she wrote during their 18 months together.