33. The Years by Annie Ernaux
Translation: from French by Alison L. Strayer (2017)
OPD: 2008
format: 282-page paperback
acquired: April 2023 read: May 17-25 time reading: 7:24, 1.9 mpp
rating: 4¼
genre/style: 3rd-person, sometimes collective, autobiography theme: TBR
locations: France 1941-2008
about the author: French writer and 2022 Nobel Prize winner, born in Lillebonne, France, 1940.

"She feels herself in several different moments of her life that float on top of each other. Time of an unknown nature takes hold of her consciousness and her body too. It is a time in which past and present overlap, without bleeding into each other, and where, it seems, she flickers in and out of all the shapes of being she has been."

This seems to be the feeling she had at one point when she was conceiving this as an autobiography. But Ernaux's thinking evolved over time, over several years. What finally came out in 2008 was a collective "we" autobiography. It's easy reading, but I had trouble at first really getting into it. I even put it down for a few days and focused on the more difficult [Asphodel]. When I picked up again, in the mid-1980‘s, suddenly I was suddenly really into everything. Part of the impact depends on the reader’s own personal sense of these historical events, on how we connect to the events mentioned. . I guess the mid-80's are when I began to be aware of world events and so that is where I could begin to truly relate. Anyway, after that I was all in, deeply in.

The translator's note sneaks in a review of the prose, and I think it's worth quoting:

"The Years is at least twice as long as all but one of AE's previous books and in other ways, too, is a departure from her other work. There are many different atmospheres and registers, styles and rhythms. It is a book with a vast, sweeping scope (from microcosm to macrocosm and back), lots of movement and many different "speeds”. "

This is a terrific translation and terrific personal trip through time. I really enjoyed and can recommend it.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/360386#8545004

.75 stars. this mostly didn't work for me but part of that is the recapping of the years and people that might be so french specific (or european specific) that i didn't know what she was talking about. i feel old, generally, but this book made me feel young because my political and social consciousness was only awakened toward the very end of what she was remembering. this is a book for people who lived through what she's talking about, if even them. but i didn't appreciate it, or the writing in most instances.

i prefer memoir that manages to illuminate something both general and specific and (other than a sentence or paragraph here and there) this really does neither. i know it's supposed to be different than what she typically writes, but this doesn't inspire me to want to read anything else she's written.

"The thing most forbidden, the one we'd never believed possible, the contraceptive pill became legal. We didn't dare ask the doctor for a prescription and the doctor didn't offer, especially if one wasn't married - that would be indecent. We strongly sensed that with the pill, life would never be the same again. We'd be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man." ( )

Imagination falters when an idea is more important than art. Annie Ernaux is a great writer, but Les années is not her best book.

The idea of creating an impersonal biography seems a paradox. Biography is the genre par excellence to give an in-depthe description of a person. Postmodern writers experimented for years making the person irrelevant, or so it seemed. Numerous fictional biographies have been written about random, insignificant (fictional) charachters. In Ernaux's novel the person is completely absent, although it is widely believed to be autobiographical, and therefore the person is implied. However, this is an assumption. The main character merely resembles the author closely.

The impersonal character of the book means that a myriad of details is described: innumerous minor details, impressions, moments, piled up like a bric-a-brac. Readers may enjoy this as largely they see a parade of iconic moments from their own lives. Fortunately, the book is relatively thin.

However, the impersonal nature of the observations creates a great sense of detachment, and therefore, ultimately, Les années is a flawed novel, unless its function is to illustrate the connectedness within the unconnectedness. It is hard to feel anything for this novel. However, I do feel these negative feelings are what the novel is about. ( )

Shared Headlines

A thoroughly enjoyable look-back at a French writer’s reactions to fifty years of sociopolitical landscapes.

Major and minor events, tastes and movements from the 1950s through the early twentieth century are chronicled by Erneaux from the point of view of her “circle”. Being born only half a decade after the writer, I’m assuming the circle is left-intellectual. The book is a mix of memoir and a personal account of history.

Throughout the book Erneaux uses “we” as the subject and the work is presented as a “collective memory” of the writer’s peers. As she is viewing the world through French eyes, some of the events she notes are local to the French. I recognized only a few of the politicians for example, the obvious de Gaulle, Mitterand, Chirac, Macron. Le Pen. But the bulk of the world news of the times was recognizable, as were the writer’s reactions to the events they described. The war with Algeria through the demonstrations of ‘68 to the destruction of the Twin Towers and the war in Iraq are recounted as if from a collective memory of a group of middle-class French. As well as world events, technological and social issues and tastes are recounted. From the inventions of the transistor radio to cell phones, the impacts are memorialized, as are very minor domestic trends, such as using salt to remove wine-stains from carpets.

The Years fitted well with my own understanding and recollections Of western history. The half decade age-difference did have a jarring effect in a couple of instances. The ‘68 student rebellion for example. I was still studying and Erneaux was married with at least one child. The demonstrations I remember differed from Erneaux’s as I felt dead center, while she reacted as a conventional married woman looking in at them, wishing she were a part. And of course she still uses the subject, “we”.

So while I enjoyed and related to the book, I would not expect everyone to identify with Eareaux’s “We”. Even so, it’s an interesting if not insightful look back at life in the second half of the twentieth century in France.

Recommended. ( )

She says at the end of the book that she has been writing an impersonal autobiography. She has attempted to link as closely as she can, a life (mostly her life) with historical events over a period of nearly 60 years in Paris (France). In a short prologue she describes random photographs starting from sometime after the end of the second world war. The meat of the book starts with her looking at a sepia tinted oval photograph of a baby, which she describes as belonging to the family archives. It has the date written on the back 1941 and the place as Lillebonne and as Annie Ernaux was born in 1940 at Lillebonne it can be deduced that she is looking at her own baby pictures. She describes the photo along with other photos from that same period in the family album. This leads her to think of historical events of that period. As the book progresses and she looks at more photos of the years as they go by, she is then able to link those photos to how she felt at the time as memories come flooding back. She remembers important events, the songs she heard, the reading she did and the films she saw. Later still when she became interested in politics, political events increasingly feature, however the most interesting parts of the book are when she writes about how she felt as a woman to the events that unfolded and which affected her life.

60 years or so is a long period to cover in a book that runs to just 250 pages, but as it is set out like a number of snapshot paragraphs rarely lasting more than 2 pages it works well. She guides her readers through the deprivation in Paris after the end of the second world war, examining the black and white photographs she sees and remembers the struggles within her own family and how people mended and made do, clinging to life within the family as they tried to make the best of things. She came from a relatively poor family and so life for her was harder than for some. She talks about the feelings of frustration during the last years of General de Gaul's rule, but then things start to improve. As a young woman she benefits from the sexual freedom ushered in by the contraceptive pill, certain woman started to feel more independent of men and this was reflected in some literature and female icons started to appear, she remembers Simone de Beauvoir as one of the first.

She states that 1968 was "the first year of the world." The student riots in Paris and the striking workers that at one time threatened the existence of the fifth republic. Ernaux was 28 and married with two children at this time, but there is regret that she could not be personally involved. She describes it as a period of hope for real change to a more equal society and as the years pass by and the progressive ideas of that time were pushed further away, she looks back to a sort of missed opportunity. She celebrates with friends and family when François Mitterand was elected as the first socialist president.

Later in the book a picture of a woman alone in her garden leads her to reflect on a life as a divorcé. Her children have grown and left home and she celebrates her freedom. It is like she is recapturing or continuing on from her youth that was put on hold when she married. She can go out dating, she can have lovers when the opportunity arises and can follow her own interests and diversions. She talks later of having a younger lover and the joy it aroused in her. She always uses the third person, as though she is keeping these memories at a little distance, perhaps she is imagining she is speaking for other women similar to her and by linking her thoughts and feelings to incidents and events in Paris and the world beyond, she is creating a sort of universal portrait. As she gets older she feels less assured in the world. The terrorist incidents in Paris in 1995 targeting the transport system shake her considerably as she lives in the suburbs and the new technological revolution and use of smart phones is a challenge. She becomes more concerned with the world situation. She is critical of the consumer society and worries about wars that continue to threaten peace. The book ends as it started with a series of sentences describing photographs in the public domain that have lived in her memory.

This was a fascinating read for me as I have only lived in France since 2005 and the book was published in 2008 and although I have spent sometime trying to catch up with the culture that I have missed, I still had to google names, places and events that would be familiar to native french people or at least native Parisians: I started making a list, but soon gave up. There are of course some wise words and I noted some sentences that I like (excuse my rough translations):

On politics: It was better to live without expecting anything from the left than worrying continually about the right.

On religion: the catholic church in losing the battle over the sexual revolution lost everything

Life in the 1970's when the war was no longer the subject of most conversations: It was a time when the children replaced the time of the dead.

Sex: To be here in this bed with this young man, it is a sensation that does away with her history and she says that she wrote in her diary: He has lifted me out of my generation, but I am not in his, I am nowhere in time. It is the angel that has revived the past; made it eternal.

Her attempts at making this an impersonal biography have resulted in hardly anything written directly about her own life. There is nothing about her career as an author. She has used the term autosociobiographie to reflect her oeuvre and Les années fits right in with this. In some ways it is an ambitious book which I don't think always works, for example it can degenerate into a list of events, which is encouraged by the snapshot approach to the layout, however it is still a four star read and I would add an extra half star for filling in some background to my life in France. ( )