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 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. ( )

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. ( )