The young man

Nobel Prize winner Ernaux (The Years) recounts her yearlong affair with a man three decades her junior in this slim yet stunning memoir. After the man, a student referred to here only as "A," made several attempts to contact Ernaux about her work, she began seeing and sleeping with him in 1998, when he was 24 and she was 54. Initially trepidatious, Ernaux quickly became enchanted by the ways A. helped her "travel through all the ages of life," stirring memories of her own time as a student and reminding her of the working-class roots she'd learned to weed out in adulthood. Remarkably clear-eyed about the relationship's pitfalls and pleasures, Ernaux shares, in fragments, the ways it provoked within her both a sense of righteousness ("Any fifty-something guy could carry on openly with a woman obviously not his daughter without arousing disapproval") and sadness ("More and more it seemed to me that I could continue to accumulate images, experiences, years, and no longer feel anything but repetition itself"). Eventually, the sadness took over, and Ernaux ended their relationship in the fall of 1999, "happy to be entering the third millennium alone and free." Throughout, she suffuses even simple moments--a brasserie lunch, a glimpse out of the window at her lover's house--with a kind of magic, seamlessly layering the perspectives of her current and former selves. The result is a poignant and essential addition to Ernaux's oeuvre. (Sept.)

The Nobel laureate revisits a love affair with a much younger man. In her latest book to appear in English, Ernaux recounts a brief love affair with A., a man who was 30 years her junior. "He gave me pleasure and made me relive things I would never have imagined experiencing again," she writes. The book, which is slim, occasionally stark, and very much to the point--more an essay than a full-length volume--is by no means a florid account. Instead, Ernaux candidly describes how the relationship caused her to reexamine not only sex and sensuality, but memory and time itself. "With him I traveled through all the ages of life, my life," she writes. Fittingly, she spends less time describing A. as a person than she does the various insights their relationship revealed. She was with a younger man "so that I would not continually be looking at the timeworn face of a man my age, the face of my own aging. When A.'s face was before me, mine was young too. Men have known this forever, and I saw no reason to deprive myself." The major pleasure in reading this book--and it is a major pleasure--comes not so much from gasping over sensual details but from savoring Ernaux's sentences and the searing clarity of her thinking. It isn't just that she avoids sentimentality, though she does that, too. It's that the author can (and does) analyze all kinds of intersecting threads--aging, class, desire, regret--without a sense of shame or an impulse to sugarcoat any of the truths she uncovered during her time with A. She even delves into the possibility of motherhood: "He wanted to have a child with me. This desire troubled me and made me feel the profound unfairness of being in good physical shape but no longer able to conceive." A crucial addition to Ernaux's oeuvre. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.