Wow was this fucking wild. I have sort of never read anything like this. Another one that I wouldn’t have found without the Reading Challenges! In Libro.fm’s hosted challenge focused on audiobooks, one of the prompts was an audiobook in translation — typically my audio fare is thrillers, mysteries, romances, rom-coms; sometimes little forays into memoir/non-fiction, but exceedingly rarely. I was somehow just NOT in the mood for a romantic or suspenseful book — which, haha, joke’s on me, since this was oddly both of those things, but like, on speed. I stumbled across it in Libro’s playlist of Women in Translation (so much cool stuff there!) and was oddly hooked by the premise — of this great writer’s actual diaries focused on her affair, of a year and a half, with a younger Soviet diplomat. My background studying Russian (language and literature, but of course also infused with all the specific idiosyncrasies of the place’s culture and history, not to mention my life as a classical musician) for sure made this even more startlingly bizarre and just impossible to turn away from. What a weird and riveting book: raw and desperate and humiliating, but somehow NOT from the writer’s words; it’s instead an odd, external experience somehow, the reader’s intensity of discomfort and shame and horror at reading all the inner workings of this narrator totally subsumed with infatuation. Truly wild and bizarre, yet — bizarrely, also — the writing itself is kind of amazing. This is my first Ernaux, and while I think the depths of horror and trauma and pain I’ve read about in much of her work are probably not possible for me I think I will at some point come back and read Simple Passion, the novel based on this same period of time from which her diaries became Getting Lost. Overall just…whew, wow, whoa. God.