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Staff Reviews
In one sense, The Years is a memoir spanning Annie Ernaux's childhood in post-war Northern France and up to the present day, but it isn't really, not at all. The Years is a collective memoir - of France, of the world, of the late 20th century. Ernaux, in the kind of relentless unsentimental prose of Sontag or de Beauvoir, writes without ever using an 'I', without ever mentioning a feeling, and demonstrates like nobody else I've ever read the ways that politics and history work on a life. JFK being assassinated? Not important when you're 22 and 8 weeks pregnant. Sexual liberation? Not such a liberation when you're married at 25, with a baby and a teaching position and a long grocery list, for all your education and philosophical acumen. The Years is personal writing like I've never encountered before, a memoir of a generation.
— Madeleine
Description
The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present--even projections into the future--photos, books, songs, radio, television, and decades of advertising and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Although Ernaux had, for years, been hailed as a beloved bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir written by entire generations and a story of generations telling a very personal story.
