this book by Annie Ernaux, a French Nobel laureate, is described within the text as an ‘impersonal autobiography’ – a history of post-war France refracted through Ernaux’s experience. And it’s absolutely astounding.
Told chronologically from 1941 to 2008, Ernaux explains that it’s not ‘a work of remembrance in the usual sense’. It isn’t a straight memoir but a tapestry of collective memory, the memory of her generation, in which Ernaux’s is one story.
Sometimes she writes of ‘we’, sometimes ‘they’, and when describing specific moments in her own life, she uses ‘she’, but there is no ‘I’ in the book. And so, we’re taken inside the experience of women of Ernaux’s class and ethnicity, as the war fades into austerity, as the forties become the fifties, as childish play becomes adolescent yearning.
Ernaux writes about politics, colonial wars, sex, the reproductive pill, civil unrest, novels, films, music. she tells us how it felt to first use a mobile phone, of the fear of HIV, the shock of 911, the insidious creep of the internet. She writes about how her generation experienced these changes and how it altered the way they saw the world.
Studded throughout the book are descriptions of photographs from different times in Ernaux’s life – photos of Ernaux and her family on holiday, as she ages, as her sons grow up.
Writing of ‘she’, when looking at herself, Ernaux reflects on who this woman was, and on the events she was going through – divorce, breast cancer, a relationship with a younger man. But she offers no explanations or justifications – she examines her own life as coldly and unsentimentally as she assesses her country.
She writes of what this woman cared about, not what she thought she should; not of how she wanted herself or France to be, but who she and her country really were – for good and ill. She’s frank and unsparing, telling us about the ugly attitudes of her generation towards African immigrants, but also how these prejudices changed over time.
She lays out her conceits and vanities. she tells us that amidst great, world-changing events, her concerns were often petty. in doing so she frees us to reflect on the truth of our own lives and why the world has become what it is – that despite our protestations, it’s been shaped by what we’ve been willing to accept, and what we haven’t.
It’s rich, moving and really beautifully written, but it has serious heft as a clear-sighted description of the post-war intellectual development of the West – of the victory of consumerism and digital media over our minds and bodies, of how we became the anxious, impatient, money-obsessed societies we are.
The Years also reminds us that we are active agents in this world. It reassures us that we can’t care about everything, but is brutally honest about what happens when we pull away.
