In twelve short texts written between 1984 and 2006, here is Annie Ernaux at her most incisive and intimate, presenting readers with yet another new experience of the razor’s edge of the author’s sensibility, this time in the form of brief works of fiction or nonfiction.

In “Hotel Casanova,” the title story of this collection, Ernaux describes a series of hotel-room trysts with a man who holds no interest for her other than sexually, just after her mother is admitted to hospital suffering from severe dementia. The story brilliantly captures the loss of sense of self, and at the same time the intense pleasure and pain that she experiences through a kind of cascade of alienation. Then, in “Histories,” Ernaux recalls a time in her childhood when she was the older girl responsible for a younger neighbor, holding her hand and bringing her to school and then home again, and the feelings of loss that ensued when this ended.
Another memory inhabits “Returns,” this time of her last visit to her mother at home, and how the collision of their two fragile emotional states plays out during the hours spent together, like a collision of the past and the future.

These personal narratives are joined by more journalistic essays on such themes as the true relationship between literature and politics, discourses on Cesare Pavese and Pierre Bourdieu—both of whom were major influences on Ernaux, though in very different ways—travel journals of Moscow, Leningrad, Leipzig, and short personal essays on writing and other subjects. A mix of seemingly unrelated texts that comprise the song of a considered life.