Because Ernaux has written about her mother ( A Womans Story ), her father ( A Mans Place ) and herself ( Cleaned Out ), one can almost hear an anxious tremor in the narrators (Ernauxs?) lovers voice as he says, You wont write a book about me. But she has. Actually, its not about him but about their affair and even more about the intense time between their intimacies. Ive experienced pleasure, she says, as future pain. At the peak of their liaison, the successful, well-educated narrator is able to concentrate only on what furthers or reflects her passions: she shops for clothes, listens to popular songs, reads the horoscopes in womens magazines, watches pornographic television, searches for a theater showing Nagisa Oshimas carnal In the Realm of the Senses and, of course, waits anxiously by the phone. Whether or not A, a married Eastern European businessman, was worth it, is, she says, of no consequence. Ernaux alternates between writerly objectivity and total immersion, blurring the line between fiction and autobiography. Throughout, one finds oneself noting, but, of course, this is a novel only to add a few pages later but, of course, this is real life. Since less time has elapsed between events recorded here and those she so poignantly recalled in her earlier books, perhaps it is just this lack of reflective distance that makes Simple Passion less successful than its predecessors. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.