The Years

Is it fiction or is it true? This is the question I've had for almost every book I've read by Ernaux, and this one is no exception. In fact, it's the challenging sort of read I had expected when I first picked up some of her novel-ish memoirs after Ernaux was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022. She gives a sort of broad overview of her life, but generally instead of making it personal, she holds her past self at a remove. Most of the story is told in a collective "we" and becomes the story of a generation. But it is also deeply personal, coming in close to look at photographs and tell us about "her" life more specifically.

It was helpful to me to have read A Man's Place, A Woman's Story and A Girl's Story to have a frame of show more reference for some of the occurrences she briefly mentions. Covering the years between 1940 and about 2008, the narrative refers briefly to several events in French and world history that I was unfamiliar with. But if you let the details sort of wash over you and think about what memory is, how we join with family at the table and the adults' stories are heard by kids who run off for some of it and then return, and years later we become those adults... well, that sort of experience is universal. In the end, I'm glad I read it. show less

The first question one wants to ask is is this a novel or a memoir? The closest kin (in book terms) is Karl Ove Knausgaard's
My Struggle, but there are others where the re-explored and re-imagined life can be considered as both memoir and fiction. The author is generally after a 'truth' that might not exactly please family members as being 'what happened' as well as being absurd to claim that your version is the "real" one but Ernaux has side-stepped or gone further by attaching the life of the narrator/protagonist to the events going on concurrently during her life. She doesn't separate herself as a single individual exclusively, but as both -- herself and a person deeply influenced, indeed arguably created by the times she has lived show more in. It's a breathtaking concept and she succeeded in giving me a new way to regard my own life -- something only the great writers can do, shift a little something in your head. Not easy to read but I suggest that if you plan to, don't get hung up on the details of what was going on in France but associate them with your own experience at that time in your own context and at the appropriate age. A younger person would find this more challenging but they might find themselves examining their present obsessions and beliefs more skeptically! I read about half the book in French and English together then ran out of time and read only the English for the remainder. I plan to read the rest of her work. Extraordinary. ***** show less

A two hundred page version of 'We Didn't Start the Fire', but French.

The last quarter or so really picked up, perhaps because my nostalgia overlapped some with the author from the 80s onward. The closing confiding autofiction landed, and reminded me of my mother and grandmothers.

"Save something from the time where we will never be again."

This is the story of a woman's life (Annie Ernaux's) merged and intertwined with the history of her times, from 1940 (when she was born) through 2008, shortly before the book was published. The book is structured with recurring leitmotifs--photographs at intervals, starting when she was a baby and ending when she was a grandmother. She describes each photograph, who took them, and tries to surmise what the subject (herself at various ages) may have been thinking, or was thinking, if she remembers. She also describes the circumstances of her life at the time, her thoughts and goals if she can remember them.

Another motif is family dinners over time, what was eaten who was there, show more what the discussions were about, and how all of these changed over time.

In between these mostly personal things are people, events, trends, intellectual thoughts, occurring or prevalent at the time, some seemingly grabbed from the headlines ("the day Saigon fell we realized that we'd never believed an American defeat possible. They were finally paying for the napalm, the little girl on the poster that hung on our walls.").

At various times during her adulthood, she discusses a book she wants to write, and considers how to arrange it. She wants to write a book that would be a personal narrative, but also a history of her time, "How would she organize the accumulated memory of events and news items and the thousands of days that have conveyed her to the present?" And this is the book that resulted.

Annie Ernaux, who won the Nobel for literature this year, is a few years older than me, but many of her experiences were my experiences, and this book really spoke to me (i.e. "1968 was the first year of the world."). Since her life was mostly lived in Europe, the events she discusses are more Euro-centric, so there were many references I was unfamiliar with. But thank goodness for Google.

Her statements about aging in particular resonate with me at this particular time of my life:

"She has lost her sense of the future, a kind of limitless background on which her actions and gestures were once projected, a waiting for all the good and unknown things that lived inside her...."

and,

"As the time ahead objectively decreases, the time behind her stretches farther and farther back, to long before birth and ahead to a time after her death."

Highly recommended.

5 stars show less

Sauver quelque chose du temps où l'on ne sera plus jamais

Les Années is a very interesting attempt to mix the forms of memoir and social history to create a kind of depersonalised autobiography which is at the same time a history of living in France from the 1940s to the early 21st century - from de Gaulle to Sarko. She writes about herself in the third person ("elle", not "je") and avoids the perfect tense as far as possible to insist on the generality of the experiences she is describing. She isn't trying to rewrite Proust: "La recherche du temps perdu passait par le web", she notes ironically when discussing the first years of the new century. But the book does take concrete artefacts, in particular photographs of herself, as show more stimulants of memory.

The viewpoint is detached, none of the characters in the story is named, but she doesn't try to step entirely outside her own experience: she is explicitly writing as a woman born in the 1940s, coming from a provincial, working-class background, and spending her working life in an intellectual, left-leaning environment. The text is full of references to products, films, books, songs, political and cultural events, causes, technological change, and all the other markers that we use to place ourselves in history, but it becomes vague and allusive when it is talking about personal life. Births and deaths happen offstage, love affairs are commented on mostly in retrospect (Ernaux has written in detail about all these things elsewhere, of course).

Obviously you miss some of the fine detail of this if you haven't actually lived in France during the decades she is describing (I've probably seen about 1/10 of the films she mentions and heard of about half of the politicians and musicians...), but that isn't really important: it's a book that makes you think about history and memory and the way the two work together in literature, and that's always an interesting and worthwhile exercise. And it manages to look at nearly seventy years of social and political change without becoming morose and pessimistic. The tone is always pleasantly ironic, never overcome by events, but never so detached that it refuses to take a moral stand. Very nicely done! show less

Annie Ernaux's book belongs in that odd genre of auto-fiction, books that are based on the author's own life, but the events of the past have either been altered or the author concedes that their own memories are not necessarily accurate. Here, Ernaux takes her own life and memories as a way of telling the story of what life was like during her life, for herself, for women in France, and for France itself.

Beginning in the mid-1940s, the book begins with Ernaux's earliest memories, and with descriptions of family photos of herself. As her story moves forward, it becomes a universal story of a time and place, of what family dinners looked like, what school was like and how things changed over time, with lifestyles adapting to the show more availability of consumer goods, as the older folks died and so the Sunday dinner conversations moved on from the war to other subjects, like the events in Algeria or student uprisings.

This is a superbly constructed and immensely readable book. I did stop many times to look up names and events, but that was due to my lack of knowledge of French history and popular culture. It was so interesting to look at a time slightly different from my own (Ernaux belongs to my parents' generation) and at a country other than my own. Ernaux mixes the personal with the universal as she writes her way through the years of her life and the result is something greater than either a straight memoir or social history would have been. show less

A soulless and joyless march through a life conceived as a passive recipient of headlines and social events. The author explains her purpose at the end. She creates a narrator who is an unstable collection of observations--there is no I, no person, or subject who experiences life. It didn't work for me. I care very much about the person who is a moral agent, who finds higher values and purpose in life, and makes sense of the whirlwind of "history." Maybe she proves Descartes' point. Try as she did, there is an I there, but that I is a weak and passive recipient of confusing forces--life happens to her, but the anemic response isn't love or rage or really much of anything.