The Years
by Annie Ernaux
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The back cover copy of The Years by Annie Ernaux describes itself as a “collective autobiography,” meaning that it eschews the first-person focus of traditional memoirs and replaces it with the second person. It starts in the period just after World War II, which traumas strengthened the French people’s national identity:
From a common ground of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’ voice and with impersonal pronouns, as if everyone were equally affected by events.
From there, Ernaux explores the memories of her entire lifetime, all the way to the present day. I really enjoyed the writing, and it seemed like there was a profound sentence or paragraph every few pages. The book effortlessly zooms in and out between scenes of everyday life, like a family dinner or a classroom; and sweeping descriptions of social and political change, like the progress of women’s rights or the tumultuous back-and-forth of France’s presidential elections.
At every moment in time, next to the things it seems natural to do and say, and next to the ones we’re told to think - no less by books or ads in the Métro than by funny stories - are other things that society hushes up without knowing it is doing so. Thus it condemns to lonely suffering all the people who feel but cannot name these things. Then the silence breaks, little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last, while underneath other silences start to form.
Because I’m not French, I did have trouble connecting with some sections of the book, which I’ll call “lists of stuff”—basically, Ernaux rattles off a series of names or references to things that I’m sure a French reader would recognize, but went over my head. It did slow the pace of my reading, and I was only able to digest a few pages at a time. But, I will say that as the book progressed into my own lifetime, and started to mention historical events that I myself remember, it felt like her memories were overlapping with mine. It had the effect of demonstrating how the world has become more connected, so that we’re not limited to caring only about the news of our own countries.