Wow. This one is going to stick with me for a while.
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and communal, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of auto-fiction and sociology, The Years is ”a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism” (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.
This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. She will go within herself only to retrieve the world, the memory and imagination of its bygone days, grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility, the transformation of people and the subject that she has seen – perhaps nothing compared to those her granddaughter will see, as will all beings who are alive in 2070. To hunt down sensations that are already there, as yet unnamed, such as the one that is making her write.
Further reading:
- The Years by Annie Ernaux review – a masterpiece memoir of French life - published in The Guardian by Lauren Elkin
- Reclaiming the Past in the Internet’s ‘Infinite Present’ - published in the NY Times by Edmund White
Written on 16/02/2023