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The Years
WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.
The Years is a personal narrative of the period 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, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.
Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given 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. Though 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. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they”, or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we” and impersonal pronouns.”
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist’s defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.
The Years is a personal narrative of the period 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, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.
Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given 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. Though 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. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the “I” for the “we” (or “they”, or “one”) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents’ generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents’ generation (and could be writing of her own book): “From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the “we” and impersonal pronouns.”
240 pages, Paperback
First published February 7, 2008
About the author
Annie Ernaux
73 books6,638 followersThe author of some twenty works of fiction and memoir, Annie Ernaux is considered by many to be France’s most important writer. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place and the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. More recently she received the International Strega Prize, the Prix Formentor, the French-American Translation Prize, and the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation for The Years, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. Her other works include Exteriors, A Girl's Story, A Woman's Story, The Possession, Simple Passion, Happening, I Remain in Darkness, Shame, A Frozen Woman, and A Man's Place.
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March 15, 2021
AGGIUNGI UN POSTO A TAVOLA
In principio sembra di essere dentro “I Remember” di Joe Brainard, magari nella versione transalpina di George Perec, “Je me souviens” **.
Ma la sensazione è breve, solo le prime poche pagine: poi, gli elenchi, e le liste dei ricordi si fermano, lasciano posto a una memoria più collettiva, che però non trascura mai il punto di vista personale.
Non è un ‘io’ che ricorda e racconta, ma un ‘noi’. Un plurale che abbraccia e coinvolge, tutti.
È l’unione tra esperienza individuale ed esperienza storica, tra storia e Storia, tra micro e Macro.
Il ricordo s’interseca e si mischia con la memoria, si sostengono e nutrono a vicenda, la crescita del singolo è parte delle trasformazioni che coinvolgono il Noi.
Annie Ernaux racconta il nostro tempo, e così facendo, scrive la nostra vita insieme alla sua.
È come leggere il proprio diario scritto da qualcun che scrive molto meglio di noi. È come immergersi nel proprio passato e presente, è come vivere e ripercorrere il proprio tempo.
Per quanto riguarda la sua esistenza, quando il ‘noi’ diventa un ‘io’, espresso però attraverso un ‘lei’ che sembra allontanare e ridimensionare l’urgenza del soggetto, della sua personale vicenda Annie Ernaux seleziona parecchio e tralascia tutto il racconto della sua carriera artistica. Che l’io/lei che si esprime sia anche una grande scrittrice è lasciato fuori.
È però ben presente il percorso di formazione di questo testo specifico, lungo decenni, faticoso, ragionato, iniziato forse più volte, e forse più volte abbandonato, ma sempre tenuto vicino, sempre sentito importante, vitale, urgente: nonostante la lentezza e lunghezza del processo di composizione narrativa, attestato più volte all’interno de “Gli Anni”, si percepisce una tensione e una necessità che ha qualcosa di erotico.
Il ricordo prende il via dai pranzi domenicali della famiglia, ripetuti ritmicamente nel tempo, momento collettivo per antonomasia: i nonni e i genitori quando chi scrive è ancora figlia, che poi diventa adulta, incontra un uomo, e i nonni se ne sono andati per lasciare il posto a tavola a nuovi arrivati, che man mano diventano i figli della scrittrice, da figlia diventata madre, e poi i nipoti divenuti adulti, la vita si ripete e continua attraverso gli incontri intorno a un desco.
Il ricordo si nutre anche delle fotografie di famiglia: i passaggi di tempo, lo scorrere degli eventi è scandito dalle fotografie che Ernaux descrive, così come dai pasti dei giorni di festa che racconta.
Scrittura lenta, e lettura profonda.
Scrittura neutra, quasi obiettiva, che non giudica, non impone valutazioni, senza condanne e senza metafore, tesa a restare all’interno del confine dei fatti e delle cose: supermercati, mezzi pubblici, prodotti commerciali e oggetti di consumo sono parte fondamentale della memoria tanto quanto aspetti del vivere solitamente considerati più degni, più ‘alti’.
Il libro si chiude su una frase particolarmente significativa che condensa l’intento letterario di Annie Ernaux:
Salvare qualcosa del tempo in cui non saremo mai più, salvare le immagini che scompariranno
Un libro bello. Molto bello.
Secondo me, anche importante. Prezioso.
Un libro che mette i brividi.
Un libro che fa sognare.
Un libro che abita il tempo, e la memoria.
**
Gli elenchi sono ormai strumento banalizzato, se ne è persino appropriata la televisione.
Ma le liste dei modi di dire, del lessico comune che rappresenta un periodo, un determinato tempo, sono rari e magnifici, e ho l’impressione che resteranno nel futuro così come ci sono arrivati i caratteri cuneiformi, e saranno meritevoli di essere conservati e riscoperti, ci rappresenteranno come i geroglifici hanno fatto per gli antichi egiziani.
In principio sembra di essere dentro “I Remember” di Joe Brainard, magari nella versione transalpina di George Perec, “Je me souviens” **.
Ma la sensazione è breve, solo le prime poche pagine: poi, gli elenchi, e le liste dei ricordi si fermano, lasciano posto a una memoria più collettiva, che però non trascura mai il punto di vista personale.
Non è un ‘io’ che ricorda e racconta, ma un ‘noi’. Un plurale che abbraccia e coinvolge, tutti.
È l’unione tra esperienza individuale ed esperienza storica, tra storia e Storia, tra micro e Macro.
Il ricordo s’interseca e si mischia con la memoria, si sostengono e nutrono a vicenda, la crescita del singolo è parte delle trasformazioni che coinvolgono il Noi.
Annie Ernaux racconta il nostro tempo, e così facendo, scrive la nostra vita insieme alla sua.
È come leggere il proprio diario scritto da qualcun che scrive molto meglio di noi. È come immergersi nel proprio passato e presente, è come vivere e ripercorrere il proprio tempo.
Per quanto riguarda la sua esistenza, quando il ‘noi’ diventa un ‘io’, espresso però attraverso un ‘lei’ che sembra allontanare e ridimensionare l’urgenza del soggetto, della sua personale vicenda Annie Ernaux seleziona parecchio e tralascia tutto il racconto della sua carriera artistica. Che l’io/lei che si esprime sia anche una grande scrittrice è lasciato fuori.
È però ben presente il percorso di formazione di questo testo specifico, lungo decenni, faticoso, ragionato, iniziato forse più volte, e forse più volte abbandonato, ma sempre tenuto vicino, sempre sentito importante, vitale, urgente: nonostante la lentezza e lunghezza del processo di composizione narrativa, attestato più volte all’interno de “Gli Anni”, si percepisce una tensione e una necessità che ha qualcosa di erotico.
Il ricordo prende il via dai pranzi domenicali della famiglia, ripetuti ritmicamente nel tempo, momento collettivo per antonomasia: i nonni e i genitori quando chi scrive è ancora figlia, che poi diventa adulta, incontra un uomo, e i nonni se ne sono andati per lasciare il posto a tavola a nuovi arrivati, che man mano diventano i figli della scrittrice, da figlia diventata madre, e poi i nipoti divenuti adulti, la vita si ripete e continua attraverso gli incontri intorno a un desco.
Il ricordo si nutre anche delle fotografie di famiglia: i passaggi di tempo, lo scorrere degli eventi è scandito dalle fotografie che Ernaux descrive, così come dai pasti dei giorni di festa che racconta.
Scrittura lenta, e lettura profonda.
Scrittura neutra, quasi obiettiva, che non giudica, non impone valutazioni, senza condanne e senza metafore, tesa a restare all’interno del confine dei fatti e delle cose: supermercati, mezzi pubblici, prodotti commerciali e oggetti di consumo sono parte fondamentale della memoria tanto quanto aspetti del vivere solitamente considerati più degni, più ‘alti’.
Il libro si chiude su una frase particolarmente significativa che condensa l’intento letterario di Annie Ernaux:
Salvare qualcosa del tempo in cui non saremo mai più, salvare le immagini che scompariranno
Un libro bello. Molto bello.
Secondo me, anche importante. Prezioso.
Un libro che mette i brividi.
Un libro che fa sognare.
Un libro che abita il tempo, e la memoria.
**
Gli elenchi sono ormai strumento banalizzato, se ne è persino appropriata la televisione.
Ma le liste dei modi di dire, del lessico comune che rappresenta un periodo, un determinato tempo, sono rari e magnifici, e ho l’impressione che resteranno nel futuro così come ci sono arrivati i caratteri cuneiformi, e saranno meritevoli di essere conservati e riscoperti, ci rappresenteranno come i geroglifici hanno fatto per gli antichi egiziani.
February 7, 2020
What a fabulous collage of life - Ernaux melds history, feminism, and pop culture with snippets from her own experience since the 1940s, casting her life into sharp relief through a combination of imagery and analysis. The book accumulates as it goes, picking up speed as life accelerates - the 90s blip by in a way the tumultuous 60s in Paris don't. The contexualization of life with history is jarring - proof with relative time - and the book is uniquely effective. Though it has its slowness, I looked forward to reading this every day.
"Because in her refound solitude she discovers thoughts and feelings that married life had thrown into shadow, the idea had come to her to write "a kind of woman's destiny" set between 1940 and 1986. It would be something like Maupaussant's A Life and convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself."
"Because in her refound solitude she discovers thoughts and feelings that married life had thrown into shadow, the idea had come to her to write "a kind of woman's destiny" set between 1940 and 1986. It would be something like Maupaussant's A Life and convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself."
October 31, 2021
Permítanme que, como Ernaux, empiece con una cita de Chéjov:
Verdaderamente, envidio al público francés coetáneo de la autora por este documento sobre la Francia post Segunda Guerra Mundial. Aunque el mundo se haya ido globalizando y todos los occidentales compartamos muchos de los hechos históricos y los procesos sociales y políticos que se han ido produciendo, aquellos que no hemos vivido en Francia durante Los años no podemos tener con la autora la complicidad que conlleva esa memoria sentimental compartida repleta de noticias locales, personajes políticos, intelectuales, libros, películas, actores y actrices, canciones, artistas, famosillos, víctimas de horribles o simpáticos sucesos, eslóganes, anuncios o programas de radio y televisión, multitud de iconos que solo pertenecen a una generación en un tiempo y en un espacio concreto. Y, aunque no me considero ese tipo de lector que necesita imperiosamente identificarse de alguna forma con la historia leída, me habría encantado compartir toda esa carga sentimental con la autora.
“Lo que querría es salvarlo todo, lo que ha existido alrededor suyo, continuamente, salvar su circunstancia.”De esto se trata, de dejar constancia de una vida individual en el contexto social y sentimental en el que esta sucedió, “salvar algo del tiempo en el que ya no estaremos nunca más”, el mismo objetivo de Proust, uno de sus autores preferidos, aunque, obviamente, no comparta ni mirada ni experiencia vital ni estilo, lento, detallista, sentimental y laberíntico el de uno, seco, cortante, distante y directo el de la otra.
“Una de las grandes cuestiones susceptibles de hacer que avance el conocimiento de sí es la posibilidad o la imposibilidad de determinar cómo, en cada edad, cada año de la existencia, se representa uno el pasado.”Y así es como ella procede en esta nueva entrega, nueva para mí, de Ernaux: una sucesión de párrafos cortos sobre un sinfín de detalles de su vida personal y colectiva a lo largo de más de sesenta años, y como esos recuerdos, así como la idea que iba teniendo de sí misma y de sus futuros deseados en cada uno de los presentes, han ido también cambiando a lo largo de Los años.
Verdaderamente, envidio al público francés coetáneo de la autora por este documento sobre la Francia post Segunda Guerra Mundial. Aunque el mundo se haya ido globalizando y todos los occidentales compartamos muchos de los hechos históricos y los procesos sociales y políticos que se han ido produciendo, aquellos que no hemos vivido en Francia durante Los años no podemos tener con la autora la complicidad que conlleva esa memoria sentimental compartida repleta de noticias locales, personajes políticos, intelectuales, libros, películas, actores y actrices, canciones, artistas, famosillos, víctimas de horribles o simpáticos sucesos, eslóganes, anuncios o programas de radio y televisión, multitud de iconos que solo pertenecen a una generación en un tiempo y en un espacio concreto. Y, aunque no me considero ese tipo de lector que necesita imperiosamente identificarse de alguna forma con la historia leída, me habría encantado compartir toda esa carga sentimental con la autora.
“Todo se borrará en un segundo. El diccionario acumulado de la cuna hasta el lecho de muerte se eliminará. Llegará el silencio y no habrá palabras para decirlo. De la boca abierta no saldrá nada. Ni yo ni mí. La lengua seguirá poniendo el mundo en palabras. En las conversaciones en torno a una mesa familiar seremos tan solo un nombre, cada vez más sin rostro, hasta desaparecer en la masa anónima de una generación remota”.No obstante, he caminado gustoso a su lado durante todo su periplo personal, una historia marcada por victorias que terminaron convirtiéndose en derrotas: empezando por su paso por la universidad que acabó por sentir como la ruptura con su mundo de origen, las grandes ilusiones y decepciones políticas —mayo del 68, Mitterrand, la igualdad entre hombres y mujeres (creo que las mujeres también lo disfrutarán aún más que nosotros)…—, su matrimonio, la llegada de nuevos tiempos en los que “la profusión de cosas escondía la escasez de ideas y el desgaste de las creencias”, hasta ese momento en el que nos damos cuenta que hemos pasado de relegar a nuestros padres por haberse quedados anclados en el pasado a ser arrinconados por nuestros hijos que, al igual que nosotros unos años antes, en la seguridad de saberlo todo de la vida, se burlan de nuestra incompetencia y de nuestras trasnochadas ideas sobre casi todo, hasta ese momento, vivido como la derrota definitiva, en el que somos conscientes de que el futuro ha dejado de ser un “espacio de fondo ilimitado”.
“Le invadía la vieja impresión de sentirse fuera de la fiesta.”Una novela de derrotas que sin embargo termina con una gran victoria, la escritura de esta novela para la que tanto esfuerzo gastó durante años hasta encontrar la forma definitiva y que consiguió salvando tanto a una tercera persona con su “demasiada exterioridad, alejamiento” como a la primera y su “demasiada permanencia, estrechez, asfixia” y con la que consigue emocionar sin buscarlo, invitándonos e incitándonos a repasar también nuestra vida y volver a aquellos hechos, propios y colectivos, que marcaron las etapas de nuestra historia y así, como la autora, poder “unir esas múltiples imágenes de ella, separadas, desajustadas, mediante el hilo de un relato, el de su existencia”.
June 21, 2023
This book is essentially an autobiography structured around a chronology of French history, politics and societal change from WW II to the present. What follows is a summary rather than a review. While I avoid spoilers related to the author’s personal life, I really have to say SPOILERS FOLLOW.
The author (the 2022 Nobel Prize winner) picked a bad time to be born: 1940, right at the start of WW II. She grew up in a small town in Normandy, 90 miles from Paris, when people still didn’t travel much. “…when you never leave home, even the next town is the ends of the earth.” People who had seen the Eifel tower “took on an air of superiority.”
Sections of the story are introduced by photos, later movies, and videos of a girl and her family as is someone is flipping through an old album.
Some of the things we read about:
Black and white TV, radio and television jingles for products; the annual Tour de France bicycle race where she tracked riders' progress with dots on a map. They had radios but saw TV only in cafes and in store windows where people gathered to watch. All the religious stuff: boys and girls sat on separate sides in church, no meat on Fridays. The hardship of poverty – never throw anything away. Newspaper used as toilet paper. Her schooling at a parochial girls’ school and all the crazy misinformation girls spread about sex.
We mark time by great events like a railway strike in 1953 and the fall of Dien Bien Phu, 1954. The fighting in Algeria. There are big international events too: the building of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, JFK’s assassination, Mao, the Beatles.
As a young teen she feels backward. Her family doesn't have a Frigidaire on indoor plumbing and she still hasn’t been to Paris. But there is an onslaught of new things: plastic cooking utensils replace metal ones; a gas stove replaces coal; a Formica kitchen table replaces the old wooden one covered with an oilcloth. Record players, hula hoops, transistor radios.
(This is not from the book, but from a magazine article I read recently mentioning how important the cheap transistor radio was that every kid could have. Parents controlled the music on the TV and the expensive big radio and record player in the living room. But now kids could listen to their own music in their rooms. Bing Crosby and Patti Page, parental favorites, did not promote rebellion.)
The author tells us that the feeling of endless progress was so strong in the 1960s that people talked of having a pill for food in 2000, robots would do the housework and people would be living on the moon. Did that happen?
There was ‘a pill’ though. In France, only available to married women. Girls thought “We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.”
The author makes much of the student strikes and political turmoil that upended the French nation starting in May 1968. That was a watershed in French history. She tells us that even years afterward, you might meet someone and think ‘What side was he on in 1968?’ After those events, “Now, everything one considered normal had become the object of scrutiny.” She writes “1968 was the first year of the world.” After 1968, ‘everyone was supposed to be listened to’: women, gays, miners, prisoners, prostitutes.
Now the pictures in the album become those of a young married woman with kids, bringing in bags of groceries from a car. It was an era of materialism. “Spending was in the air.” And “The ideals of May 1968 were being transformed into objects of entertainment.” People dreamed of a country life (which most had gladly left behind by then), while they flocked to cities and suburbs.
But she tires of this life. Her new symbol is a shapeless dress that indicates “Fatigue and an absence of a desire to please.” She is seized “…for the first time by the terrible meaning of the phrase I have only one life.” [LOL When is GR going to let us use italics without special formatting?]
The socio-political environment changes again. It’s a time of concern about Arab immigration – the Banlieue ghettos. Catholicism has essentially vanished from their lives. Sony Walkmans and computer games amplify the process of walling oneself off from society that began with the transistor radio. At a later age the author tells us the computer was “…the first object to which we ever felt inferior.” “We never ceased to upgrade. The failure to do so meant saying yes to aging.”
I found it fascinating too that way back, starting in the 1960s, the anti-immigration platform of right-wing political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (father of Marine Le Pen who has continued his prejudices) presaged the racism and antisemitism of today’s American political scene where Le Pen “…was the guy who said out loud what others were secretly thinking.”
Late middle age is a time of dispossession. The kids have left home; the husband is gone, furniture is being sold off, parents are gone or going.
Did you ever read a book where you WANTED footnotes? There are dozens of references to French events that most Americans will be clueless about. Just one example: she mentions ‘the Petit-Clamant attack.’ That’s it. You have to look it up if you want to know that’s the name of a town where a hit squad fired machine guns at President de Gaulle’s car in an assassination attempt in 1962. (There are 20 or so footnotes, I guess for references that even French people might find obscure, but believe me, an American needs many more footnotes. We know from context that many are references to grisly crimes, such as Bruay-en-Artois.
I loved the book because I enjoyed learning about recent French history and politics. The author is a bit older than me but the timeline for innovations is about the same as it was for me since the US was probably a few years ahead of France in our ability to buy consumer stuff.
This is the second book I've read by the 2022 Nobel Prize winner (b. 1940). Almost all of her work is autobiographical. Her books in order, catalog her parents’ lives, her teenage years, her marriage, her affair with an East European man (Simple Passion, the first book of hers I read), an abortion she had, the onset of Alzheimer's, her mother's death, her battle with breast cancer.
Top photo the author in the 1960s from annie-ernaux.org
Demonstrations in Paris in May 1968 from thenewyorker.com
The author from nytimes.com
[Revised 6/21/23]
The author (the 2022 Nobel Prize winner) picked a bad time to be born: 1940, right at the start of WW II. She grew up in a small town in Normandy, 90 miles from Paris, when people still didn’t travel much. “…when you never leave home, even the next town is the ends of the earth.” People who had seen the Eifel tower “took on an air of superiority.”
Sections of the story are introduced by photos, later movies, and videos of a girl and her family as is someone is flipping through an old album.
Some of the things we read about:
Black and white TV, radio and television jingles for products; the annual Tour de France bicycle race where she tracked riders' progress with dots on a map. They had radios but saw TV only in cafes and in store windows where people gathered to watch. All the religious stuff: boys and girls sat on separate sides in church, no meat on Fridays. The hardship of poverty – never throw anything away. Newspaper used as toilet paper. Her schooling at a parochial girls’ school and all the crazy misinformation girls spread about sex.
We mark time by great events like a railway strike in 1953 and the fall of Dien Bien Phu, 1954. The fighting in Algeria. There are big international events too: the building of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, JFK’s assassination, Mao, the Beatles.
As a young teen she feels backward. Her family doesn't have a Frigidaire on indoor plumbing and she still hasn’t been to Paris. But there is an onslaught of new things: plastic cooking utensils replace metal ones; a gas stove replaces coal; a Formica kitchen table replaces the old wooden one covered with an oilcloth. Record players, hula hoops, transistor radios.
(This is not from the book, but from a magazine article I read recently mentioning how important the cheap transistor radio was that every kid could have. Parents controlled the music on the TV and the expensive big radio and record player in the living room. But now kids could listen to their own music in their rooms. Bing Crosby and Patti Page, parental favorites, did not promote rebellion.)
The author tells us that the feeling of endless progress was so strong in the 1960s that people talked of having a pill for food in 2000, robots would do the housework and people would be living on the moon. Did that happen?
There was ‘a pill’ though. In France, only available to married women. Girls thought “We’d be so free in our bodies it was frightening. Free as a man.”
The author makes much of the student strikes and political turmoil that upended the French nation starting in May 1968. That was a watershed in French history. She tells us that even years afterward, you might meet someone and think ‘What side was he on in 1968?’ After those events, “Now, everything one considered normal had become the object of scrutiny.” She writes “1968 was the first year of the world.” After 1968, ‘everyone was supposed to be listened to’: women, gays, miners, prisoners, prostitutes.
Now the pictures in the album become those of a young married woman with kids, bringing in bags of groceries from a car. It was an era of materialism. “Spending was in the air.” And “The ideals of May 1968 were being transformed into objects of entertainment.” People dreamed of a country life (which most had gladly left behind by then), while they flocked to cities and suburbs.
But she tires of this life. Her new symbol is a shapeless dress that indicates “Fatigue and an absence of a desire to please.” She is seized “…for the first time by the terrible meaning of the phrase I have only one life.” [LOL When is GR going to let us use italics without special formatting?]
The socio-political environment changes again. It’s a time of concern about Arab immigration – the Banlieue ghettos. Catholicism has essentially vanished from their lives. Sony Walkmans and computer games amplify the process of walling oneself off from society that began with the transistor radio. At a later age the author tells us the computer was “…the first object to which we ever felt inferior.” “We never ceased to upgrade. The failure to do so meant saying yes to aging.”
I found it fascinating too that way back, starting in the 1960s, the anti-immigration platform of right-wing political leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (father of Marine Le Pen who has continued his prejudices) presaged the racism and antisemitism of today’s American political scene where Le Pen “…was the guy who said out loud what others were secretly thinking.”
Late middle age is a time of dispossession. The kids have left home; the husband is gone, furniture is being sold off, parents are gone or going.
Did you ever read a book where you WANTED footnotes? There are dozens of references to French events that most Americans will be clueless about. Just one example: she mentions ‘the Petit-Clamant attack.’ That’s it. You have to look it up if you want to know that’s the name of a town where a hit squad fired machine guns at President de Gaulle’s car in an assassination attempt in 1962. (There are 20 or so footnotes, I guess for references that even French people might find obscure, but believe me, an American needs many more footnotes. We know from context that many are references to grisly crimes, such as Bruay-en-Artois.
I loved the book because I enjoyed learning about recent French history and politics. The author is a bit older than me but the timeline for innovations is about the same as it was for me since the US was probably a few years ahead of France in our ability to buy consumer stuff.
This is the second book I've read by the 2022 Nobel Prize winner (b. 1940). Almost all of her work is autobiographical. Her books in order, catalog her parents’ lives, her teenage years, her marriage, her affair with an East European man (Simple Passion, the first book of hers I read), an abortion she had, the onset of Alzheimer's, her mother's death, her battle with breast cancer.
Top photo the author in the 1960s from annie-ernaux.org
Demonstrations in Paris in May 1968 from thenewyorker.com
The author from nytimes.com
[Revised 6/21/23]
October 7, 2022
Update: Huge congrats to Annie Ernaux —- Nobel Prize of Literature for 2022.
“The Years”, a translated memoir, was shortlisted of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. It starts in the year 1940....until Annie Ernaus’s sixty-sixth year.
This my first experience with Annie Ernaux. I haven’t read her novels, yet.
I enjoyed the thoughts “The Years” stimulated about memories, aging, family stories from one generation to the next - the culture in which Annie grew up - the depths and influence the world wars had on Annie associated with family members who lived through those horrors of war.....
And....I liked the narrative - the dinner conversations. I especially enjoyed hearing about her early childhood and teen experiences.
The rest of this review will highlight parts I liked - relating them to my own life-of-limitations.....(with those universal thoughts: again....yes, again, about love, loss, family, world and family history, and death).
“I’m capable of the best and the worst, but at being the worst I am the best!”
“Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me.
Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation”.
“Memory was transmitted not only through the stories but through the ways of walking, sitting, talking, laughing, eating, hailing someone, grabbing hold of objects. It passed body to body, over the years, from the remotest countrysides of France and other parts of Europe: a heritage unseen in the photos, lying beyond individual differences and the gaps between the goodness of some and the wickedness of others. United family members, neighbors, and all those whom one said ‘They’re people like us’, a repertory of habits and gestures shaped by childhoods in the fields and teen years and workshops, preceded by other childhoods, all the way back to oblivion”.
“We felt nothing in common with the ye-yes, who said ‘Hitler never heard of him, and their idols’, who were even younger than we: girls with pigtails and songs for the schoolyard; A boy who bellowed and writhed on the floor of the stage. We had the feeling they’d never catch up to us. Next to them, we were old. Perhaps we would die under de Gaulle”.
“But we were not adults. Sexual life remained clandestine and rudimentary, haunted by the specter of ‘an accident’. No one was supposed to have a sex Life before marriage. Boys believed their lewd innuendos displayed advance erotic science, but all they knew how to do was ejaculate on an area at the girls body to which she directed him, for the sake of caution. No one knew for sure whether or not they were still virgins. Sexuality was a poorly resolved matter on which girls held forth for hours in resistance rooms no boy was allowed to enter”.
“She also imagines herself in twenty years trying to remember the discussions of today—everyone’s—on communism, suicide, and contraception. The women of twenty years from now is an idea, a ghost. She will never live to be that age”.
The narrator, her parents, and friends talked about the hardships in their early lives and the world wars.
They told stories of distant cousins, ancestors and long-ago neighbors.
The narrator says at this generation, that of the parents and earlier:
“From a common ground of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’”.
There were also many descriptions of photos - black-and-white - or home movies from different times of the narrator’s life.
Annie Ernaux was born in 1940. She grew up in Normandy. She taught high school from the years 1977 to 2000, and was a professor at the Center National d’Enseignement par Correspondence.
She was considered one of France’s most esteemed living writers, her books have been subject to much critical acclaim. She won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for “A Man’s Place” when it was first published in French in 1984.
The translator, Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governors General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du liver de Montreal, and the Prix litteraire France-Quebec. She lives in Paris
I’m not French savvy....not anything savvy....but this short read - about 150 pages - kept me company during the dark sleepy hours -
I felt a warmth of connectedness to Annie, her family, and the horrors of the world wars.
I enjoyed this enough to want to read a novel by Annie Ernaux
“The Years”, a translated memoir, was shortlisted of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize. It starts in the year 1940....until Annie Ernaus’s sixty-sixth year.
This my first experience with Annie Ernaux. I haven’t read her novels, yet.
I enjoyed the thoughts “The Years” stimulated about memories, aging, family stories from one generation to the next - the culture in which Annie grew up - the depths and influence the world wars had on Annie associated with family members who lived through those horrors of war.....
And....I liked the narrative - the dinner conversations. I especially enjoyed hearing about her early childhood and teen experiences.
The rest of this review will highlight parts I liked - relating them to my own life-of-limitations.....(with those universal thoughts: again....yes, again, about love, loss, family, world and family history, and death).
“I’m capable of the best and the worst, but at being the worst I am the best!”
“Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me.
Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation”.
“Memory was transmitted not only through the stories but through the ways of walking, sitting, talking, laughing, eating, hailing someone, grabbing hold of objects. It passed body to body, over the years, from the remotest countrysides of France and other parts of Europe: a heritage unseen in the photos, lying beyond individual differences and the gaps between the goodness of some and the wickedness of others. United family members, neighbors, and all those whom one said ‘They’re people like us’, a repertory of habits and gestures shaped by childhoods in the fields and teen years and workshops, preceded by other childhoods, all the way back to oblivion”.
“We felt nothing in common with the ye-yes, who said ‘Hitler never heard of him, and their idols’, who were even younger than we: girls with pigtails and songs for the schoolyard; A boy who bellowed and writhed on the floor of the stage. We had the feeling they’d never catch up to us. Next to them, we were old. Perhaps we would die under de Gaulle”.
“But we were not adults. Sexual life remained clandestine and rudimentary, haunted by the specter of ‘an accident’. No one was supposed to have a sex Life before marriage. Boys believed their lewd innuendos displayed advance erotic science, but all they knew how to do was ejaculate on an area at the girls body to which she directed him, for the sake of caution. No one knew for sure whether or not they were still virgins. Sexuality was a poorly resolved matter on which girls held forth for hours in resistance rooms no boy was allowed to enter”.
“She also imagines herself in twenty years trying to remember the discussions of today—everyone’s—on communism, suicide, and contraception. The women of twenty years from now is an idea, a ghost. She will never live to be that age”.
The narrator, her parents, and friends talked about the hardships in their early lives and the world wars.
They told stories of distant cousins, ancestors and long-ago neighbors.
The narrator says at this generation, that of the parents and earlier:
“From a common ground of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’”.
There were also many descriptions of photos - black-and-white - or home movies from different times of the narrator’s life.
Annie Ernaux was born in 1940. She grew up in Normandy. She taught high school from the years 1977 to 2000, and was a professor at the Center National d’Enseignement par Correspondence.
She was considered one of France’s most esteemed living writers, her books have been subject to much critical acclaim. She won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for “A Man’s Place” when it was first published in French in 1984.
The translator, Alison L. Strayer is a Canadian writer and translator. Her work has been shortlisted for the Governors General’s Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du liver de Montreal, and the Prix litteraire France-Quebec. She lives in Paris
I’m not French savvy....not anything savvy....but this short read - about 150 pages - kept me company during the dark sleepy hours -
I felt a warmth of connectedness to Annie, her family, and the horrors of the world wars.
I enjoyed this enough to want to read a novel by Annie Ernaux
February 8, 2021
müthiş, müthiş bir kitap. uzun süredir bu kadar etkilendiğim bir şey olmamıştı.
otobiyografik ama anlatım tarzıyla değil.
kişisel ama inanılmaz politik.
neyi neden yaptığını açıklıyor ama nasıl bu kadar ustalıkla yapabildiğine akıl sır erdiremiyoruz.
1940'lardan 2010'lara kadarki değişimin fotoğraflar öncülüğünde, anılarla, ders kitabı, film, roman, tv programları, gazeteler, seçimler, ölümler eşliğinde gözümüzün önünde akıp gitmesi.
okuduğum süre boyunca türkiye'yle karşılaştırdım bir de. fransa'da 60'lardan itibaren yaşanan tüketim çılgınlığının, bizde nasıl 90'larda başladığı ve 2000'lerde tüm dünyanın bu konuda nasıl eşitlendiği... teknolojinin nasıl ayak uydurulamaz bir boyuta geldiği... ölüm kalım savaşı seçimlerin hayatımızdaki etkisi... nasıl benziyor her şey.
ve annie ernaux acaba şu pandemiyi nasıl anlatırdı? öyle merak ediyorum ki.
küçücük bir kız çocuktan, adet gören genç kıza, hamile kalmamaya çalışan üniversiteliye, 2 çocuk bakmaya çalışan evli bir kadına, sonrasında boşanmış bekar bir anneye, yaş almış ama kendisini hiç değişmemiş gören olgun bir kadına, büyükanneye dönüşümü anlatan politik, tarihsel bir başyapıt bence. ve kadınlık nasıl aynı aslında her yerde...
sık sık jonathan coe'nun "yağmurdan önce"sini hatırladım. fotoğraf bağı oldukça benzer ama o kadar tabii.
ve siren idemen sanki ernaux'ya kitabı türkçe yazdırmış. öyle iyi bir çeviri.
otobiyografik ama anlatım tarzıyla değil.
kişisel ama inanılmaz politik.
neyi neden yaptığını açıklıyor ama nasıl bu kadar ustalıkla yapabildiğine akıl sır erdiremiyoruz.
1940'lardan 2010'lara kadarki değişimin fotoğraflar öncülüğünde, anılarla, ders kitabı, film, roman, tv programları, gazeteler, seçimler, ölümler eşliğinde gözümüzün önünde akıp gitmesi.
okuduğum süre boyunca türkiye'yle karşılaştırdım bir de. fransa'da 60'lardan itibaren yaşanan tüketim çılgınlığının, bizde nasıl 90'larda başladığı ve 2000'lerde tüm dünyanın bu konuda nasıl eşitlendiği... teknolojinin nasıl ayak uydurulamaz bir boyuta geldiği... ölüm kalım savaşı seçimlerin hayatımızdaki etkisi... nasıl benziyor her şey.
ve annie ernaux acaba şu pandemiyi nasıl anlatırdı? öyle merak ediyorum ki.
küçücük bir kız çocuktan, adet gören genç kıza, hamile kalmamaya çalışan üniversiteliye, 2 çocuk bakmaya çalışan evli bir kadına, sonrasında boşanmış bekar bir anneye, yaş almış ama kendisini hiç değişmemiş gören olgun bir kadına, büyükanneye dönüşümü anlatan politik, tarihsel bir başyapıt bence. ve kadınlık nasıl aynı aslında her yerde...
sık sık jonathan coe'nun "yağmurdan önce"sini hatırladım. fotoğraf bağı oldukça benzer ama o kadar tabii.
ve siren idemen sanki ernaux'ya kitabı türkçe yazdırmış. öyle iyi bir çeviri.
June 11, 2019
I was in a bookshop in Cork city and chatting with one of the managers I know and I asked if anything of worth had actually been published in the last year. He said not really except for one thing. That ended up being this book. He told me to read the first page, which I did, and I was immediately sold.
Ernaux's style of memoir-as-social-history is such an enjoyable form of writing. It reminded me of reading Alexievich for the first time, that discovery of a whole new mode of storytelling. The whole book is such an immersive evocation of French life, rarely have I read a memoir that so engrains the reader into its world.
What a stunning work.
Ernaux's style of memoir-as-social-history is such an enjoyable form of writing. It reminded me of reading Alexievich for the first time, that discovery of a whole new mode of storytelling. The whole book is such an immersive evocation of French life, rarely have I read a memoir that so engrains the reader into its world.
What a stunning work.
April 12, 2020
Structured like a scrapbook, The Years documents the history of France from the time of WWII to the late 2000s. Ernaux patiently examines the aging of the generation that grew up in the wake of the Liberation of Paris, alternating between detailing collective experience in the first-person plural and recounting her own daily life in the third-person singular. The work reads as a slow-moving collage of images, phrases, advertisements, artworks, private memories, and public events, plucked from time and carefully arranged into a continuous narrative. In detached, sometimes dreamy, prose the writer expertly captures the pace of social change, and demonstrates how values and ways of living alter over the years, in an unpredictable, zigzag way.
Read
April 7, 2023There's a Citroën Deux Chevaux on the cover of my edition of this Annie Ernaux memoir. I have a memory related to a car like that. It was on one of my early trips to France as a student, and I barely knew how to drive. The owner of the car insisted I take his car for a spin but what with the steering wheel being on the opposite side, the gear shift looking like an umbrella handle, and me being very much in awe of the car's owner, my feet mistook the pedals and I pressed the accelerator to the floor instead of the clutch. The poor car did a dreadful shuddering lurch and its owner ordered me out of the driving seat sur le champ! That embarrassing moment embedded itself deep in my memory. It is always ready to rise to the surface whenever I see a Deux Chevaux.
Many of my memories are in the form of such images, brief glimpses of moments in time, captured by my internal image maker. The images are of things that inspired or moved me, that woke me up or shocked me deeply. They don't surface very often but when they do, they have as much clarity as things I registered only yesterday. When I try to situate them in their wider context however, I often run up against a blank. The time that lead up to them, the time after them, is gone. There is nothing but the moment itself, isolated like a photo in an album. Some of them may not even be real memories. I may have invented them, perhaps from an anecdote I heard or something I've seen somewhere. There is no way to know which are real but it doesn't matter because they are all part of my memories, part of who I am.
Annie Ernaux's memories are much clearer than mine. When she focuses on isolated moments from her past, she doesn't rely on internal images as I seem to do, though she has many of those to draw on and they fill the beginning and end pages of this memoir which have the feel of a dreamlike movie made up of unconnected scenes. However, the body of the book is much more concrete, devoted as it is to a meticulous examination of photos from Ernaux's family album.
When she examines her selection of photos, she doesn't say, this is me on a day trip to the seaside in 1948 aged eight. Instead she talks about the girl in the photo in the third person, but refers to the girl's generation as 'we'. The 'we' gets much more focus than the 'she'—Ernaux seems driven to merge her personal past with that of her entire generation, and she succeeds very well.
Her France is very vivid, and her analysis of the details of its history, culture and politics feels very accurate. There is no nostalgia, no sentimentality. She is setting down the record because she is aware that France has changed a lot in her lifetime. She remembers a time when there was continuity between the past and the present, when people spoke of the Algerian war, WWII, WWI and even the Franco Prussian war, around the Sunday dinner table. A time when, if people spoke of the future, they had fixed images of it, personal spaceships and robots, etc. In 2006, which is as far as she goes in this memoir, she speaks of the past being uninteresting to the newer generations, and the future, unimaginable. Continuity between the past, present and future has somehow been lost.
I appreciated this book for the way it restores my sense of the continuity of history. After many visits to France as a student and young adult, I moved there in the nineties and reared my children there. Living in the country on a permanent basis, I began to notice things I'd never seen on my previous visits, things like the alienating fringe of warehouse shops on the outskirts of every town, selling everything you needed to set up house. There was always a super-sized supermarket in among those warehouse shops, with checkout desks that seemed to stretch for miles. Those supermarkets sold all sorts of cheap preprepared food that shocked my notions of French eating habits based on holiday experiences of old quaint streets and market places where everyone seemed to buy fresh food and prepare it themselves.
When I read Ernaux's account of those years, I realised that she was as destabilized by the appearance of such huge commercial outlets as I was, and that she was also noticing the changes in people's eating habits as working lives got more stressful and there was no one at home slowly and carefully preparing food. But she never sounds nostalgic (as I might). No, she always sounds objective, just recording all the changes, and revealing how they happened. Her memoir is like a documentary film of 66 years in the life of a country. It is the best kind of history.
Many of my memories are in the form of such images, brief glimpses of moments in time, captured by my internal image maker. The images are of things that inspired or moved me, that woke me up or shocked me deeply. They don't surface very often but when they do, they have as much clarity as things I registered only yesterday. When I try to situate them in their wider context however, I often run up against a blank. The time that lead up to them, the time after them, is gone. There is nothing but the moment itself, isolated like a photo in an album. Some of them may not even be real memories. I may have invented them, perhaps from an anecdote I heard or something I've seen somewhere. There is no way to know which are real but it doesn't matter because they are all part of my memories, part of who I am.
Annie Ernaux's memories are much clearer than mine. When she focuses on isolated moments from her past, she doesn't rely on internal images as I seem to do, though she has many of those to draw on and they fill the beginning and end pages of this memoir which have the feel of a dreamlike movie made up of unconnected scenes. However, the body of the book is much more concrete, devoted as it is to a meticulous examination of photos from Ernaux's family album.
When she examines her selection of photos, she doesn't say, this is me on a day trip to the seaside in 1948 aged eight. Instead she talks about the girl in the photo in the third person, but refers to the girl's generation as 'we'. The 'we' gets much more focus than the 'she'—Ernaux seems driven to merge her personal past with that of her entire generation, and she succeeds very well.
Her France is very vivid, and her analysis of the details of its history, culture and politics feels very accurate. There is no nostalgia, no sentimentality. She is setting down the record because she is aware that France has changed a lot in her lifetime. She remembers a time when there was continuity between the past and the present, when people spoke of the Algerian war, WWII, WWI and even the Franco Prussian war, around the Sunday dinner table. A time when, if people spoke of the future, they had fixed images of it, personal spaceships and robots, etc. In 2006, which is as far as she goes in this memoir, she speaks of the past being uninteresting to the newer generations, and the future, unimaginable. Continuity between the past, present and future has somehow been lost.
I appreciated this book for the way it restores my sense of the continuity of history. After many visits to France as a student and young adult, I moved there in the nineties and reared my children there. Living in the country on a permanent basis, I began to notice things I'd never seen on my previous visits, things like the alienating fringe of warehouse shops on the outskirts of every town, selling everything you needed to set up house. There was always a super-sized supermarket in among those warehouse shops, with checkout desks that seemed to stretch for miles. Those supermarkets sold all sorts of cheap preprepared food that shocked my notions of French eating habits based on holiday experiences of old quaint streets and market places where everyone seemed to buy fresh food and prepare it themselves.
When I read Ernaux's account of those years, I realised that she was as destabilized by the appearance of such huge commercial outlets as I was, and that she was also noticing the changes in people's eating habits as working lives got more stressful and there was no one at home slowly and carefully preparing food. But she never sounds nostalgic (as I might). No, she always sounds objective, just recording all the changes, and revealing how they happened. Her memoir is like a documentary film of 66 years in the life of a country. It is the best kind of history.
April 6, 2023
Every page of The Years (2008) by Annie Ernaux was like a nutritious bouillon cube that kept dissolving in my thoughts for hours. I do not think I have ever read such condensed prose. It was filled to the brim with reflections, observations and images rooted in the memory of the author, who narrates not only her life, but also the experiences of her generation born during the Second World War. Humour mixes with poetry, politics with individual experience, literature with reality. I think most writers would need multitudes of 256 pages to tell a similar story. Annie Ernaux's succinct, lucid and precise writing style is her memoir's forte.
I wonder if there is a single page in this book on which I have not marked a passage that either made me laugh or marvel at Annie Ernaux's brilliance or simply moved me. Like other readers, I have the impression that if I were born around 1940, preferably in France, I would find even more in The Years. My enjoyment was hampered a bit by the need to check some historical details.
Compared to the memoirs I have read before, The Years is quite unique. Of course, the title made me think of Virginia Woolf's The Years though, which is also a poignant chronicle of fleeting moments. The detailed descriptions of family photos (how I wish the real photographs were included!) reminded me of W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz .
Although The Years is undoubtfully autobiographical, the narrator avoids using the pronoun 'I', it is always 'she' or 'we'. I guess the author's intention here was to distance herself from her experiences, to look at herself from the outside and more objectively, and to emphasise that she is not just an individual but a part of her generation too.
I liked Annie Ernaux's luminous prose, full of the images of a moment, bathed in a light that is theirs alone and kept trying to read The Years as slowly as possible to make the literary bliss last longer. It is not solely Annie Ernaux's merit but also the translator's. Alison L. Strayer did a marvellous job and her afterword is a cherry on top.
Rejection by Juan Carlos Valdeon Riaño.
I wonder if there is a single page in this book on which I have not marked a passage that either made me laugh or marvel at Annie Ernaux's brilliance or simply moved me. Like other readers, I have the impression that if I were born around 1940, preferably in France, I would find even more in The Years. My enjoyment was hampered a bit by the need to check some historical details.
Compared to the memoirs I have read before, The Years is quite unique. Of course, the title made me think of Virginia Woolf's The Years though, which is also a poignant chronicle of fleeting moments. The detailed descriptions of family photos (how I wish the real photographs were included!) reminded me of W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz .
Although The Years is undoubtfully autobiographical, the narrator avoids using the pronoun 'I', it is always 'she' or 'we'. I guess the author's intention here was to distance herself from her experiences, to look at herself from the outside and more objectively, and to emphasise that she is not just an individual but a part of her generation too.
I liked Annie Ernaux's luminous prose, full of the images of a moment, bathed in a light that is theirs alone and kept trying to read The Years as slowly as possible to make the literary bliss last longer. It is not solely Annie Ernaux's merit but also the translator's. Alison L. Strayer did a marvellous job and her afterword is a cherry on top.
Rejection by Juan Carlos Valdeon Riaño.
April 23, 2023
“Save something for the times when one isn't around anymore.“
Annie Ernaux wrote this "Les Années/The Years" (2008) some 25 years after her previous autobiographical book La Place (1984), and if you read the latter first – as I did -, then “Les Années” quite frankly is a relief. "La Place" was a harsh reckoning with her rural upbringing, and especially with her father, whilst this one is much more balanced and refined. It's the author's personal quest - at the age of almost 70 - for the life she lived and the times she went through.
Clearly, this book to Ernaux has been quite a struggle over how best to "grasp" her own life: to tell it from a personal, "I" point of view, or rather from an impersonal "she"? To start from her own life and experiences, or from the consecutive time periods she has gone through? To present it as a coherent story, or made up of varied and sometimes dissonant images and impressions? It are the methodological knots that every biographer, and especially every autobiographer, has to entangle. The interesting thing is that Ernaux gradually, and especially in the last quarter of her book, made this wrestling explicit, when she questions herself: «When the time comes to start, she (=the author) always stumbles on the same problems: how to represent at the same time the passage of historical time, the change of things, of ideas, of manners and the intimacy of this woman, to make coincide the fresco of forty-five years and the search for a self outside of History, that of suspended moments which she wrote poems at twenty, Solitude, etc. Her main concern is the choice between 'I' and 'she'. There is in the 'I' too much permanence, something constricted and stifling, in the 'she' too much exteriority, of estrangement.”
Clearly, from the beginning you notice that she has opted for a rather impersonal approach, in which she writes about herself in the third person ("she/elle"), and in which she also interprets the spirit of the corresponding periods of time in the same style, through the impersonal "one/on". This means that Annie Ernaux only occasionally appears in this story as a real person, who struggles with the inevitable existential problems that arise in each specific phase of life. The priority apparently goes to that broader framework, call it the ‘Zeitgeist’, which she tries to capture in chains of objective events, names of politicians, books and films, mixed with memories and musings. She does this very associatively, sometimes without punctuation, like a loose chronicle.
This gives the misleading impression of being an objective account, but the opposite is true: this really is the subjective experience by a concrete person, a woman that was a typical product of the “trente glorieuses”, who broke away from her family environment, developed her own life, professionally and privately, and experienced both highs and lows. Moreover, this account definitely is a ‘remembered’ experience, written down at a much older age, and thus also reflective of sensitivities of later periods. Ernaux, for example, often addresses the gender aspect of the time periods involved: the gradual emancipation of women, that she experienced and also shaped herself, but of which she also sees the relative outcome: even now men keep on determining the image and the place of women, she notes bitterly. This bitterness is something that more and more seeps through in the later stages of her life: the growing distance from the world of her children, and from the enormously changing world in general. It’s a feeling of alienation that certainly gets more pronounced, as she ages.
Until the end of the book the ambiguity remains between the evocation of a concrete life - in her case from 1941 to the moment of writing around 2007 - and the evocation of the "spirit" of a certain historical age. Personally, I found the chronicle of the 1950s and 1960s, her adolescence and early adulthood, the most successful, because that period was also one of major social changes that would eventually culminate in the famous May-68 uprising and the subsequent hangover of the 1970s. The emerging youth culture and the switch to consumerism are beautifully illustrated. But after that her chronicle becomes a little more superficial and sometimes passes over certain stages of life very quickly. Her description of the 1980s and 1990s, for example, gets bogged down in a dry enumeration of facts and names, and she suddenly pays much more attention to the political developments, following the euphoria and subsequent betrayal by president Francois Mitterrand, apparently because she experienced this from up close.
This is a very rich and impressive book, without a doubt. It is very recognizable for those who have experienced more or less the same period; I am 20 years younger than Ernaux, but her evocation of the 1970s and 1980s certainly was very recognizable to me. However, her impersonal approach makes an empathic link with the person Annie Ernaux difficult, and that is certainly a downside. But this book contains enough elements of both self-reflection and reflection on the process of remembering and giving its own personal life story a place in history, to make it into a real classic.
Finally, a small warning: the French context is ubiquitous; readers that are not familiar with French politics, literature or, say, names of chain stores will occasionally find it difficult to follow her line of thought. Once again, it's a reminder of the fact that French culture is a world that is very much focussed upon itself. (rating 3.5 stars)
Annie Ernaux wrote this "Les Années/The Years" (2008) some 25 years after her previous autobiographical book La Place (1984), and if you read the latter first – as I did -, then “Les Années” quite frankly is a relief. "La Place" was a harsh reckoning with her rural upbringing, and especially with her father, whilst this one is much more balanced and refined. It's the author's personal quest - at the age of almost 70 - for the life she lived and the times she went through.
Clearly, this book to Ernaux has been quite a struggle over how best to "grasp" her own life: to tell it from a personal, "I" point of view, or rather from an impersonal "she"? To start from her own life and experiences, or from the consecutive time periods she has gone through? To present it as a coherent story, or made up of varied and sometimes dissonant images and impressions? It are the methodological knots that every biographer, and especially every autobiographer, has to entangle. The interesting thing is that Ernaux gradually, and especially in the last quarter of her book, made this wrestling explicit, when she questions herself: «When the time comes to start, she (=the author) always stumbles on the same problems: how to represent at the same time the passage of historical time, the change of things, of ideas, of manners and the intimacy of this woman, to make coincide the fresco of forty-five years and the search for a self outside of History, that of suspended moments which she wrote poems at twenty, Solitude, etc. Her main concern is the choice between 'I' and 'she'. There is in the 'I' too much permanence, something constricted and stifling, in the 'she' too much exteriority, of estrangement.”
Clearly, from the beginning you notice that she has opted for a rather impersonal approach, in which she writes about herself in the third person ("she/elle"), and in which she also interprets the spirit of the corresponding periods of time in the same style, through the impersonal "one/on". This means that Annie Ernaux only occasionally appears in this story as a real person, who struggles with the inevitable existential problems that arise in each specific phase of life. The priority apparently goes to that broader framework, call it the ‘Zeitgeist’, which she tries to capture in chains of objective events, names of politicians, books and films, mixed with memories and musings. She does this very associatively, sometimes without punctuation, like a loose chronicle.
This gives the misleading impression of being an objective account, but the opposite is true: this really is the subjective experience by a concrete person, a woman that was a typical product of the “trente glorieuses”, who broke away from her family environment, developed her own life, professionally and privately, and experienced both highs and lows. Moreover, this account definitely is a ‘remembered’ experience, written down at a much older age, and thus also reflective of sensitivities of later periods. Ernaux, for example, often addresses the gender aspect of the time periods involved: the gradual emancipation of women, that she experienced and also shaped herself, but of which she also sees the relative outcome: even now men keep on determining the image and the place of women, she notes bitterly. This bitterness is something that more and more seeps through in the later stages of her life: the growing distance from the world of her children, and from the enormously changing world in general. It’s a feeling of alienation that certainly gets more pronounced, as she ages.
Until the end of the book the ambiguity remains between the evocation of a concrete life - in her case from 1941 to the moment of writing around 2007 - and the evocation of the "spirit" of a certain historical age. Personally, I found the chronicle of the 1950s and 1960s, her adolescence and early adulthood, the most successful, because that period was also one of major social changes that would eventually culminate in the famous May-68 uprising and the subsequent hangover of the 1970s. The emerging youth culture and the switch to consumerism are beautifully illustrated. But after that her chronicle becomes a little more superficial and sometimes passes over certain stages of life very quickly. Her description of the 1980s and 1990s, for example, gets bogged down in a dry enumeration of facts and names, and she suddenly pays much more attention to the political developments, following the euphoria and subsequent betrayal by president Francois Mitterrand, apparently because she experienced this from up close.
This is a very rich and impressive book, without a doubt. It is very recognizable for those who have experienced more or less the same period; I am 20 years younger than Ernaux, but her evocation of the 1970s and 1980s certainly was very recognizable to me. However, her impersonal approach makes an empathic link with the person Annie Ernaux difficult, and that is certainly a downside. But this book contains enough elements of both self-reflection and reflection on the process of remembering and giving its own personal life story a place in history, to make it into a real classic.
Finally, a small warning: the French context is ubiquitous; readers that are not familiar with French politics, literature or, say, names of chain stores will occasionally find it difficult to follow her line of thought. Once again, it's a reminder of the fact that French culture is a world that is very much focussed upon itself. (rating 3.5 stars)
December 9, 2021
Wow!
For something classified as auto-biography or memoir, this book left me completely cold. Reading it felt like stepping outside to walk Bobby around the block on a characteristically grey, windy, wet and bleak December day in England. Brrrrr!!!
Considering all the five star reviews here on Goodreads, I was expecting to finish it feeling, at least, a bit more warmed up.
The thing is, when I read non-fiction I like and need to be challenged and/or moved in some way to really enjoy it. I love it when an author (or someone else!) dares to question my beliefs and views but, unfortunately, nothing of what Annie Ernaux wrote got even close to doing so.
In my humble opinion, this was only a very summarised retelling of French History from the 1940s until the early 2000s from a feminist point of view. The few times some key moments of universal History were mentioned were purely with the aim of providing a chronological reference point to those reading the book, without which many might have struggled with its timeline!
Now, my friends, as most of you know by now I’m Portuguese and, even though I’ve studied French for several years in school, the ridiculous number of names, pop culture references and other cultural, social and political aspects intrinsically French related dropped within nearly every page did close to nothing for me, I’m afraid.
I can understand why this book might have turned into a literary phenomenon among readers in France, but honestly I can’t think of a single thing about it that hasn’t, more or less, been done before. I mean, I can see it as a good and lighter way for French students to get a bit more acquainted with the History of their own country, for example, but can’t, for the life of me, see a single reason for the author to think that a non French reader could possibly have any interest in getting to know the name of supermarket chains (ugh!) or what the nation’s favourite sweets were back in the 1970s.
Also, the first-person-plural point of view really kept me at arms length at all times and, because the author didn’t actually write a lot about her personal life apart from the fact that she (like everybody else) has always wanted loads of sex, I basically read this like the piece of historical writing that I think it is. In my brain, the whole book played out like an old black and white documentary instead of what could’ve been the colourful life story I was hoping for.
As I mentioned in my previous review, I don’t have what one might call an easy relationship with History and that, obviously, also played a big part in the way I reacted to this book.
I can’t say I’m very impressed with my introduction to Annie Ernaux but, thanks to the crazy number of great passages highlighted, am now curious enough to give her a second chance.
We lived in close proximity to shit. It made us laugh.
…we faced endless years of masturbation before making love permissibly in marriage. (…) Our lives were burdened with a secret that bracketed us with perverts, hysterics and whores.
The more immersed we were in work and family, said to be reality, the greater was our sense of unreality.
Only facts presented on TV achieved the status of reality.
Oh, and by the way, what were you doing on 11 September 2001?
Three stars, it is.
Highly recommended to all feminists and French lovers of Trivial Pursuit.
For something classified as auto-biography or memoir, this book left me completely cold. Reading it felt like stepping outside to walk Bobby around the block on a characteristically grey, windy, wet and bleak December day in England. Brrrrr!!!
Considering all the five star reviews here on Goodreads, I was expecting to finish it feeling, at least, a bit more warmed up.
The thing is, when I read non-fiction I like and need to be challenged and/or moved in some way to really enjoy it. I love it when an author (or someone else!) dares to question my beliefs and views but, unfortunately, nothing of what Annie Ernaux wrote got even close to doing so.
In my humble opinion, this was only a very summarised retelling of French History from the 1940s until the early 2000s from a feminist point of view. The few times some key moments of universal History were mentioned were purely with the aim of providing a chronological reference point to those reading the book, without which many might have struggled with its timeline!
Now, my friends, as most of you know by now I’m Portuguese and, even though I’ve studied French for several years in school, the ridiculous number of names, pop culture references and other cultural, social and political aspects intrinsically French related dropped within nearly every page did close to nothing for me, I’m afraid.
I can understand why this book might have turned into a literary phenomenon among readers in France, but honestly I can’t think of a single thing about it that hasn’t, more or less, been done before. I mean, I can see it as a good and lighter way for French students to get a bit more acquainted with the History of their own country, for example, but can’t, for the life of me, see a single reason for the author to think that a non French reader could possibly have any interest in getting to know the name of supermarket chains (ugh!) or what the nation’s favourite sweets were back in the 1970s.
Also, the first-person-plural point of view really kept me at arms length at all times and, because the author didn’t actually write a lot about her personal life apart from the fact that she (like everybody else) has always wanted loads of sex, I basically read this like the piece of historical writing that I think it is. In my brain, the whole book played out like an old black and white documentary instead of what could’ve been the colourful life story I was hoping for.
As I mentioned in my previous review, I don’t have what one might call an easy relationship with History and that, obviously, also played a big part in the way I reacted to this book.
I can’t say I’m very impressed with my introduction to Annie Ernaux but, thanks to the crazy number of great passages highlighted, am now curious enough to give her a second chance.
We lived in close proximity to shit. It made us laugh.
…we faced endless years of masturbation before making love permissibly in marriage. (…) Our lives were burdened with a secret that bracketed us with perverts, hysterics and whores.
The more immersed we were in work and family, said to be reality, the greater was our sense of unreality.
Only facts presented on TV achieved the status of reality.
Oh, and by the way, what were you doing on 11 September 2001?
Three stars, it is.
Highly recommended to all feminists and French lovers of Trivial Pursuit.
January 28, 2021
bir dönem romanı desen değil, otobiyografi desen? eh, tam değil; hem kişisel hem hiç değil... ne kadar farklı bir üslup, ne kadar farklı bir tür. bayıldım. itiraf edeyim başlarda “n’oluyor ya?” diye okudum ama sonra elimden bırakamaz oldum. 1940’lardan yanılmıyorsam 2006’ya kadar fransa çerçevesinde birçok konuda insanlık olarak neler düşünmüşüz, nasıl davranmışız bunları okudum aslında. kadınlar, direnişler, mülteciler, savaşlar, gençler... tabi “gelişmekte olan” bir ülke vatandaşı olarak benzer aşamaları birkaç on yıl geriden takip edince ister istemez bizim jenerasyonun türkiye’deki halini bile gördüm kaç yıl öncesinin fransa’sında. zaten kitapla ilgili hayıflandığım tek şey türk bir yazar tarafından yazılmamış olması. şu kitaptaki her bir kitabı, filmi, reklamı, ne bileyim siyasetçiyi tanıyarak, google’da bakınmaya gerek duymadan, her bir göndermeyi anında anlayarak okuduğunuzu düşünsenize. bunu yaşayamamış olmama rağmen bayıldım. yani yazarın bu kadar kişisel bir anlatıyı bu kadar kendinden uzak anlatabilmesine ve bu kadar dönemiyle birlikte, o havayı solutarak ilerletmesine hayran kaldım. beklentim çok mu yükseldi diye korkmuştum kitap ilk basıldığında yaşanan heyecanın gazına gelip alırken ama az bile yükselmiş. müthiş.
May 31, 2023
Many people seem to be comparing with Maupassant's Une Vie, which she does indeed mention at one point as a possible model, but to me this rather gorgeous book comes across more as an early twenty-first century feminist retelling of Proust.
I know what you're going to say: Proust is two and a half thousand pages long, Les Années is just two hundred and fifty. I'm not denying that that's a valid objection. Though, just possibly, it might also tell us something about the differences between men and women.
____________________
Now that I knew what the book was about, I had to read it again. The last pages, when she finally manages to find her voice and become an author, are perhaps even more moving than the corresponding ones in Le Temps retrouvé. As is her take on recapturing the past: rather than Proust's miraculous and slightly implausible revelations, it is a prosaic and credible process of painful, incomplete stitching together, which somehow still manages to create something wonderful and ineffable.
This is an extraordinary novel.
I know what you're going to say: Proust is two and a half thousand pages long, Les Années is just two hundred and fifty. I'm not denying that that's a valid objection. Though, just possibly, it might also tell us something about the differences between men and women.
____________________
Now that I knew what the book was about, I had to read it again. The last pages, when she finally manages to find her voice and become an author, are perhaps even more moving than the corresponding ones in Le Temps retrouvé. As is her take on recapturing the past: rather than Proust's miraculous and slightly implausible revelations, it is a prosaic and credible process of painful, incomplete stitching together, which somehow still manages to create something wonderful and ineffable.
This is an extraordinary novel.
January 27, 2024
Capturing life after World War II in France through one woman’s life. Big trends like consumerism, sexual liberation, AIDS, decolonization racial tensions and unemployment coalesce with pictures from the authors life
Memory like sexual desire never endse
An erudite work, more essay and history piece than novel.
I love Annie Ernaux her writing, but this book is an especially ambitious work that sets out to capture post-World War II France. The Years uses pictures as basis of recollections. From initial family observations and catch phrases that parents use: Limits: don’t ask for the moon or things that cost the earth, be happy with what you have to the desire to grow up as a kid: Nothing is certain except her desire to be grown up.
Paris was beauty and power and the big city calls. The post war years are sparse initially, We lived in a scarcity of everything but people are optimistic about what lay ahead: Progress was the bright horizon of everyone’s existence
The narration is detached, and the novel uses a lot of sweeping statements to describe the day and age. At times Ernaux recognises that the perspective used in the book is not universal: The times are not the same for everyone.
To be fair there are fun anachronisms captured as well, like arsenic cures against masturbation.
Big societal changes are captured, like youth asking more of their lives and the freedoms they want You ask too much of life and the rise of consumers and tourists: It was the dawning of the society of leisure
Growing up as a female is hard (For girls shame lay in wait at every turn), and the way Ernaux writes time definitely seems to go ever faster but all the changes feel less and less impactful to one who has established her life through the rapid succession of decolonization, the advent of consumerism, sexual liberalism, women’s rights, May 1968, AIDS, racial tensions, unemployment. There is disappointment and reflection (As if her only progress in life is of the material kind) and the sense of the end nearing is evident near the end of the book: The infinite ceased to be imaginary
A sweeping book, following both a life and development of a nation, full of observations that one can only have after a life lived and fully experienced.
Memory like sexual desire never endse
An erudite work, more essay and history piece than novel.
I love Annie Ernaux her writing, but this book is an especially ambitious work that sets out to capture post-World War II France. The Years uses pictures as basis of recollections. From initial family observations and catch phrases that parents use: Limits: don’t ask for the moon or things that cost the earth, be happy with what you have to the desire to grow up as a kid: Nothing is certain except her desire to be grown up.
Paris was beauty and power and the big city calls. The post war years are sparse initially, We lived in a scarcity of everything but people are optimistic about what lay ahead: Progress was the bright horizon of everyone’s existence
The narration is detached, and the novel uses a lot of sweeping statements to describe the day and age. At times Ernaux recognises that the perspective used in the book is not universal: The times are not the same for everyone.
To be fair there are fun anachronisms captured as well, like arsenic cures against masturbation.
Big societal changes are captured, like youth asking more of their lives and the freedoms they want You ask too much of life and the rise of consumers and tourists: It was the dawning of the society of leisure
Growing up as a female is hard (For girls shame lay in wait at every turn), and the way Ernaux writes time definitely seems to go ever faster but all the changes feel less and less impactful to one who has established her life through the rapid succession of decolonization, the advent of consumerism, sexual liberalism, women’s rights, May 1968, AIDS, racial tensions, unemployment. There is disappointment and reflection (As if her only progress in life is of the material kind) and the sense of the end nearing is evident near the end of the book: The infinite ceased to be imaginary
A sweeping book, following both a life and development of a nation, full of observations that one can only have after a life lived and fully experienced.
March 1, 2021
By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History [...] It will be a slippery narrative composed of an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes [...] To this 'incessantly other' of photos will correspond in mirror image, the 'she' of writing [...] There is no 'I' in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only 'one' and 'we'
Formally experimental - though never inaccessible, even hypnotically compelling - this is the result of Ernaux's grappling with how to represent textually the experience of living through time. As such, it continues a long tradition of writing subjectivity and I'd certainly see this as in dialogue with e.g. Virginia Woolf, Proust (both name-checked in the text) as well as the later Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk. Ernaux is self-conscious of her status as a woman, citing de Beauvoir as well as other feminist thinkers; and is equally self-aware of her lower-class French provincial birth and upbringing.
This is a book alive, then, to the ways in which we are acculturated and situated within the power structures of 'society': economic, political, social, cultural, gendered and racialised. Ernaux is as aware of how we might resist as well as the ways in which we conform or are complicit.
The narrative stretches from Ernaux's birth year, 1940, to 2006 and the telling is via a collage of 'moments' taken from everything from film posters, political slogans, best-selling books and key events, to two stories, one told in a 'we' voice ('on' in French but translated consistently as 'we' in English to keep the tone correct), and one via a third-person 'she' - the latter, disruptively, the most intimate. The inner and outer lives are thus represented from the big events that a generation experiences (May 1968, 9/11) to the atomised life of an individual - though I was constantly questioning to what extent even the 'individual' was, to some extent, a kind of 'female destiny' story told frequently through the body: first period, pregnancy scares, abortion, menopause etc.
In a kind of inversion of Sebaldian technique, the 'she' sections are headed by the description of a photo - a sort of ecphrasis - that punctuates both narratives, giving us a foothold in both the passing of time and the living life of 'Annie'. Photos become jumpy films then video, before returning to digital photos.
I see some reviewers found the Frenchness alienating through not recognising the political and cultural references but I never found this a problem - and, actually, I would suggest that what the book foregrounds is the communality of, especially, women's lives - we may take medical advances and contraception for granted (at least in the UK) but the flashpoints of adolescence, love, sex, motherhood, divorce, aging, losing parents are connections, however much they might be shored around by differing historicised discourses, values and ideologies.
Reading this review back, I realise that what is missing from my technical description of the book is how compulsively gripping and, yes, thrilling it is to read - the exciting formal and structural qualities do not overtake the interest of the narrative itself. The English translation by Alison L. Strayer is exemplary (I read some of this in French but I'm just too slow to have consumed the whole book that way) and has a quality of fluidity and pliancy, of organic being, that belies the very fact of translation.
For me, Ernaux is my find of the year - and someone whose books I'd recommend if you love Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and intellectual foremothers such as Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir. I want to rush out and consume everything Ernaux has written immediately!
January 9, 2023
Congratulations to Annie Ernaux for being the 2022 awardee of the Nobel Prize in Literature!
Having read several of her shorter books this year, just by chance, I now can suggest that the first book you should read by Annie Ernaux should maybe be A Frozen Woman, which gives the broader context of one of her over all purposes: What does it mean to have been a girl and woman in the fifties and sixties in Paris? In that book she mainly tells her own story, from early girlhood through an early marriage. It provides a kind of wider angle context for the shorter books: A Man's Story, A Woman's Story, A Simple Passion, Shame, and so on.
I think if the Nobel committee had read A Frozen Woman and then The Years, the longest book, which makes some of her purposes clearer, to tell a life—hers--but tacking back and forth between her own experience to the cultural and historical purpose in general, that might have been just enough to garner her the award. All of her books are memory experiments, autofiction, but in this one she uses the third-person “we” that seems to include others like her—from the time of her birth in 1941 to 2006, after which she published the book in 2008 in France. This English translation is listed at 2017.
The book sort of chronicles the history of all that time and her life in terms of it, and as a person who is roughly ten years younger than Ernaux, and though I'm American and a male, I felt like I could still relate to a lot of the cultural and political and even personal history she shares. The style is sort of a combination of narrating her life amidst a list of events, things she remembers from ads, songs, newspapers, tv and so on, from her childhood to grandmother-hood. This one is 250 pages, and many of those short novels come in at about 90-100 pages.
Ernaux is honored here with the Nobel—or if you don’t care about awards--just say she’s worth reading because she is, like Proust, experimenting with the problem of memory and how to speak to it, represent it. Very worthwhile reading.
Having read several of her shorter books this year, just by chance, I now can suggest that the first book you should read by Annie Ernaux should maybe be A Frozen Woman, which gives the broader context of one of her over all purposes: What does it mean to have been a girl and woman in the fifties and sixties in Paris? In that book she mainly tells her own story, from early girlhood through an early marriage. It provides a kind of wider angle context for the shorter books: A Man's Story, A Woman's Story, A Simple Passion, Shame, and so on.
I think if the Nobel committee had read A Frozen Woman and then The Years, the longest book, which makes some of her purposes clearer, to tell a life—hers--but tacking back and forth between her own experience to the cultural and historical purpose in general, that might have been just enough to garner her the award. All of her books are memory experiments, autofiction, but in this one she uses the third-person “we” that seems to include others like her—from the time of her birth in 1941 to 2006, after which she published the book in 2008 in France. This English translation is listed at 2017.
The book sort of chronicles the history of all that time and her life in terms of it, and as a person who is roughly ten years younger than Ernaux, and though I'm American and a male, I felt like I could still relate to a lot of the cultural and political and even personal history she shares. The style is sort of a combination of narrating her life amidst a list of events, things she remembers from ads, songs, newspapers, tv and so on, from her childhood to grandmother-hood. This one is 250 pages, and many of those short novels come in at about 90-100 pages.
Ernaux is honored here with the Nobel—or if you don’t care about awards--just say she’s worth reading because she is, like Proust, experimenting with the problem of memory and how to speak to it, represent it. Very worthwhile reading.
May 7, 2021
Salvar qualquer coisa do tempo onde não voltaremos a estar.
Este livro de Annie Ernaux deixou-me mal-humorada, e não era esse o efeito que eu esperava num livro tão aclamado. Talvez quem seja mais francófilo do que eu consiga retirar mais das infinitas referências culturais e históricas, mas para mim, “Os Anos” vive essencialmente do cinismo da autora e de um aborrecido “name-dropping”: listas e listas de marcas, locais, livros, filmes, canções, políticos, actores e outras personalidades. Abarcando um período que vai desde a Segunda Guerra até ao início do século XXI, salientando o mais significativo dos anos mais marcantes, o estilo almanaque desta obra não me conquistou.
A obra é escrita na terceira pessoa do singular, na primeira do plural e, menos frequentemente, na terceira pessoa do plural.
Nenhum “eu” na enunciação do que ela vê como uma espécie de autobiografia impessoal. Mas, antes”, “alguém” e “nós”, como se fosse agora a sua vez de contar os dias de um tempo anterior comum.
Sempre que a narrativa se foca no “ela”, Ernaux maravilhou-me. Consegue criar alguma distância de si mesma e ver-se fora do seu corpo e da sua vida, com passagens introspectivas e nostálgicas de grande clarividência.
Portanto, o livro a fazer era um instrumento de luta. Nunca abandonou esta ambição, mas agora, acima de tudo, gostaria de captar a luz que inunda rostos doravante invisíveis, toalhas de mesa cheias de comida desaparecida, essa luz que já lá estava, dentro das narrativas dos domingos de infância, e nunca mais deixou de descer sobre as coisas no momento em que são vividas – uma luz de outrora.
Quando usa a voz do “nós”, acho-o um exercício arrogante e redutor. Ao falar em nome de toda uma geração acaba por cair em generalizações e ideias feitas, que ainda se agudizam mais quando se refere a “eles”, numa demarcação clara de um grupo que desdenha e onde não se inclui.
Este é o terceiro livro que leio de Annie Ernaux, portanto, sei que ela é brusca e frontal, mas custou-me ler a forma deselegante como ela se refere a Simone de Beauvoir. Ainda que eu saiba que todos os santos têm pés de barro, achei mesquinho da parte de Ernaux só se referir a esse grande nome do feminismo troçando do seu aspecto, inclusive no funeral de Sartre, onde a autora já contava com 72 anos.
Quanto a Sartre, em cuja morte já tínhamos pensado antes, ela mostrou-se com grande pompa, um milhão de pessoas a desfilar atrás do caixão e o turbante de Simone de Beauvoir a deslizar no momento da descida à terra.
Talvez depois desta leitura eu esteja contaminada pelo chauvinismo de que acusam os franceses, mas “Os Anos” é de tal forma centrado na cultura francesa e na visão que a autora quer dar ao seu livro, que no ano de 1974, diz ela que “já nada acontecia na primavera, fosse em Paris ou em Praga”, esquecendo que, nessa mesma Primavera, houve uma revolução dois países ao lado, porque isso, claramente, não encaixa na sua narrativa derrotista. A narrativa de Ernaux é a do desencanto, a da amargura, a ideia de que as esperanças do pós-guerra saíram defraudas e que os ideais do Maio de 68 não vingaram porque somos todos uns burgueses e uns consumistas, que preferimos passar os fins de semana nos centros comerciais e pôr os filhos à frente de dispositivos eletrónicos que lhes tiraram a vontade de ler.
Abríamos os olhos e víamos uma mulher, completamente vestida a entrar no mar, com um casaco, saia comprida e um lenço muçulmano a cobrir-lhe a cabeça. Um homem, de tronco nu e calções, segurava-a pela mão. Era uma visão bíblica cuja beleza se transformava em nós numa emoção assustadora e livre.
Este livro de Annie Ernaux deixou-me mal-humorada, e não era esse o efeito que eu esperava num livro tão aclamado. Talvez quem seja mais francófilo do que eu consiga retirar mais das infinitas referências culturais e históricas, mas para mim, “Os Anos” vive essencialmente do cinismo da autora e de um aborrecido “name-dropping”: listas e listas de marcas, locais, livros, filmes, canções, políticos, actores e outras personalidades. Abarcando um período que vai desde a Segunda Guerra até ao início do século XXI, salientando o mais significativo dos anos mais marcantes, o estilo almanaque desta obra não me conquistou.
A obra é escrita na terceira pessoa do singular, na primeira do plural e, menos frequentemente, na terceira pessoa do plural.
Nenhum “eu” na enunciação do que ela vê como uma espécie de autobiografia impessoal. Mas, antes”, “alguém” e “nós”, como se fosse agora a sua vez de contar os dias de um tempo anterior comum.
Sempre que a narrativa se foca no “ela”, Ernaux maravilhou-me. Consegue criar alguma distância de si mesma e ver-se fora do seu corpo e da sua vida, com passagens introspectivas e nostálgicas de grande clarividência.
Portanto, o livro a fazer era um instrumento de luta. Nunca abandonou esta ambição, mas agora, acima de tudo, gostaria de captar a luz que inunda rostos doravante invisíveis, toalhas de mesa cheias de comida desaparecida, essa luz que já lá estava, dentro das narrativas dos domingos de infância, e nunca mais deixou de descer sobre as coisas no momento em que são vividas – uma luz de outrora.
Quando usa a voz do “nós”, acho-o um exercício arrogante e redutor. Ao falar em nome de toda uma geração acaba por cair em generalizações e ideias feitas, que ainda se agudizam mais quando se refere a “eles”, numa demarcação clara de um grupo que desdenha e onde não se inclui.
Este é o terceiro livro que leio de Annie Ernaux, portanto, sei que ela é brusca e frontal, mas custou-me ler a forma deselegante como ela se refere a Simone de Beauvoir. Ainda que eu saiba que todos os santos têm pés de barro, achei mesquinho da parte de Ernaux só se referir a esse grande nome do feminismo troçando do seu aspecto, inclusive no funeral de Sartre, onde a autora já contava com 72 anos.
Quanto a Sartre, em cuja morte já tínhamos pensado antes, ela mostrou-se com grande pompa, um milhão de pessoas a desfilar atrás do caixão e o turbante de Simone de Beauvoir a deslizar no momento da descida à terra.
Talvez depois desta leitura eu esteja contaminada pelo chauvinismo de que acusam os franceses, mas “Os Anos” é de tal forma centrado na cultura francesa e na visão que a autora quer dar ao seu livro, que no ano de 1974, diz ela que “já nada acontecia na primavera, fosse em Paris ou em Praga”, esquecendo que, nessa mesma Primavera, houve uma revolução dois países ao lado, porque isso, claramente, não encaixa na sua narrativa derrotista. A narrativa de Ernaux é a do desencanto, a da amargura, a ideia de que as esperanças do pós-guerra saíram defraudas e que os ideais do Maio de 68 não vingaram porque somos todos uns burgueses e uns consumistas, que preferimos passar os fins de semana nos centros comerciais e pôr os filhos à frente de dispositivos eletrónicos que lhes tiraram a vontade de ler.
Abríamos os olhos e víamos uma mulher, completamente vestida a entrar no mar, com um casaco, saia comprida e um lenço muçulmano a cobrir-lhe a cabeça. Um homem, de tronco nu e calções, segurava-a pela mão. Era uma visão bíblica cuja beleza se transformava em nós numa emoção assustadora e livre.
April 3, 2021
Övüldüğü kadar varmış, bayıldım. Bir kere teknik olarak müthiş: hiç “ben” demeden bir otobiyografi yazmayı becermiş Annie Ernaux. Kişisel deneyimini toplumsal, sosyolojik ve politik olanla ne kadar müthiş harmanlamış. Okurken sık sık aklıma Boğaziçi’nde birinci sınıfın birinci döneminin ilk dersinde bize söylenen ve sonra da unutmamamız için sıkça hatırlatılan “her şey politiktir” cümlesi geldi. 1940lardan 2006’ya dek uzanan bir zaman diliminde değişen Fransa ve dünya ve bunlarla beraber dönüşen kadın olma, hayatı deneyimleme, kendini tanımlama deneyimini anlatıyor Ernaux. Toplumsal hafızayla bireysel tecrübeyi bu zariflikle harmanlayan kitap bulmak çok zor. Sanırım kitabın son cümlesini aslında kitabın yazılma sebebi olarak okuyabiliriz: “artık asla olmayacağımız zamandan bir şey kurtarmak.” (Aklın��za Proust gelmiş olabilir, doğrudur, sıkça Proust göndermesi göreceksiniz zaten.) Kitabı yavaş yavaş okumak istedim ama yapamadım, bırakamadım zira – fakat hayatımın çeşitli dönemlerinde, kendi farklı “seneler”imde dönüp tekrar okuyacağıma ve Ernaux’nun tecrübesine ve yol arkadaşlığına ihtiyaç duyacağıma eminim. Çok etkilendim, aşırı hararetle öneriyorum ve Can Yayınları’nın basacağı yeni Ernauxları heyecanla bekliyorum. Şu çok tanıdık pasajı da buraya bırakıyorum: “(Protesto yürüyüşlerinden sonra) rozetleri eve dönüşte hatıra olarak çekmeceye koyuyorduk. İçeriğini unuttuğumuz dilekçelere imza atıyorduk, hatta imzaladığımızı unuttuğumuz bile oluyordu. (…) İnsanlar bugünden yarına yorgun düşüyordu. Coşkunun ardından dermansızlık, itirazın ardından rıza geliyordu. “Mücadele”, eğlence konusu haline gelen Marksizmin kokusunun üzerine sindiği bir kelime olarak itibarsızlaşmış, “hak savunuculuğu”ndan öncelikle tüketici hakları anlaşılır olmuştu.”
April 10, 2019
Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019
This is a very enjoyable "impersonal autobiography", which mixes Ernaux's own life story with a form of collective consciousness recalling the events of her lifetime in France and how they were perceived more widely across her generation.
I do have a certain amount of sympathy for those who feel that something so close to non-fiction should not be competing for a fiction prize, and Fitzcarraldo's own decision to give it a white cover does not help, but I still found it an interesting read, and would probably not have read it had it not been longlisted for the prize.
The French focus meant that plenty of the cultural reference points were unfamiliar, as was some of the political history (Ernaux's sympathies are with the left, so her views on the "evenements" of May 1968 and the election of Francois Mitterand and how he subsequently became deradicalised, and the rise of Le Pen were interesting).
This is a very enjoyable "impersonal autobiography", which mixes Ernaux's own life story with a form of collective consciousness recalling the events of her lifetime in France and how they were perceived more widely across her generation.
I do have a certain amount of sympathy for those who feel that something so close to non-fiction should not be competing for a fiction prize, and Fitzcarraldo's own decision to give it a white cover does not help, but I still found it an interesting read, and would probably not have read it had it not been longlisted for the prize.
The French focus meant that plenty of the cultural reference points were unfamiliar, as was some of the political history (Ernaux's sympathies are with the left, so her views on the "evenements" of May 1968 and the election of Francois Mitterand and how he subsequently became deradicalised, and the rise of Le Pen were interesting).
January 26, 2021
“Bütün görüntüler yok olup gidecek.”
Seneler; -Fransızların kara bir leke gibi gördüğü- İkinci Dünya Savaşı’nın hala devam ettiği 1940’ların başından, 2006 yılının çağdaş toplumuna uzanan ve 225 sayfada böylesine bir dönemi - adeta 20. yy’ın büyük bir bölümünü- kucaklayan “kişisel olmayan” bir otobiyografi. 60 yıllık bu geniş aralıkta fransız toplumunun dönüm noktalarıyla kişisel albümlerden fotoğraflar iç içe geçerek insanın dünya üzerindeki varlığı, özgürleşme, cinsellik, göçmenlik ve göçmene bakış açısı, kadının toplumdaki rolü, ev içindeki sorumluluk yükü, savaşlar arasındaki farklar ve etkileri, siyaset, küreselleşmenin etkilerini Annie Ernaux’nun günlük hayatına dair izler eşliğinde okuyorsunuz.
Fransa’nın yakın tarihine dair izler taşıdığı için döneme dair bir aşinalığınız olması kitabı daha anlamlı hale getirir elbette. Ancak yabancıysanız da kitapta çok kıymetli ve detaylı son notlar var. Annie Ernaux benim hayatıma instagramdaki @kadinlarneyazmis hesabı ile girdi. Yazarla ilk tanışma kitabım Yalın Tutku olmuştu. İkinci kitabım ise fransızca ile başlayıp türkçesinden bitirdiğim Les Années/Seneler oldu. Yalın Tutku ile başlayan hayranlığım da bu kitap ile aşka dönüştü. Bence her kadının okuması gereken, türünün nadide bir örneği olan, muazzam bir kitap. 2021’in ilk ayından yılın en iyi kitabını okudum muhtemelen. Lütfen okuyun.
“Artık asla olmayacağımız zamandan bir şey kurtarmak.”
Seneler; -Fransızların kara bir leke gibi gördüğü- İkinci Dünya Savaşı’nın hala devam ettiği 1940’ların başından, 2006 yılının çağdaş toplumuna uzanan ve 225 sayfada böylesine bir dönemi - adeta 20. yy’ın büyük bir bölümünü- kucaklayan “kişisel olmayan” bir otobiyografi. 60 yıllık bu geniş aralıkta fransız toplumunun dönüm noktalarıyla kişisel albümlerden fotoğraflar iç içe geçerek insanın dünya üzerindeki varlığı, özgürleşme, cinsellik, göçmenlik ve göçmene bakış açısı, kadının toplumdaki rolü, ev içindeki sorumluluk yükü, savaşlar arasındaki farklar ve etkileri, siyaset, küreselleşmenin etkilerini Annie Ernaux’nun günlük hayatına dair izler eşliğinde okuyorsunuz.
Fransa’nın yakın tarihine dair izler taşıdığı için döneme dair bir aşinalığınız olması kitabı daha anlamlı hale getirir elbette. Ancak yabancıysanız da kitapta çok kıymetli ve detaylı son notlar var. Annie Ernaux benim hayatıma instagramdaki @kadinlarneyazmis hesabı ile girdi. Yazarla ilk tanışma kitabım Yalın Tutku olmuştu. İkinci kitabım ise fransızca ile başlayıp türkçesinden bitirdiğim Les Années/Seneler oldu. Yalın Tutku ile başlayan hayranlığım da bu kitap ile aşka dönüştü. Bence her kadının okuması gereken, türünün nadide bir örneği olan, muazzam bir kitap. 2021’in ilk ayından yılın en iyi kitabını okudum muhtemelen. Lütfen okuyun.
“Artık asla olmayacağımız zamandan bir şey kurtarmak.”
October 6, 2022
The latest Fitzcarraldo Editions Nobel Prize Winner
Book 2/13 for me from the Man Booker International 2019 longlist
She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas and manners, and the private life of this woman? How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History.
The Years, translated from Annie Ernaux's 2008 original (Les années) by Alison L. Strayer, is yet another masterpiece brought to English language readers by the UK's finest publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions.
The Years is a narrative of France from 1940 (Ernaux's birth) to 2006 told in "an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes", and in the unique auto-socio-biography style that she has developed. Ernaux herself has been always keen to emphasise that everything in the books is true:
The Years opens with a collage of images and memories from throughout the period of which below are a sample
All the images will disappear:
the woman who squatted to urinate in broad daylight, behind the shack that served coffee at the edge of the ruins in Yvetot, after the war, who stood, skirts lifted, to pull up her underwear and then returned to the café
the tearful face of Alida Valli as she danced with Georges Wilson in the film The Long Absence
...
the majesty of the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, who wore a flowered smock like all the residents of the old folks’ home, but with a blue shawl over her shoulders, tirelessly pacing the corridors, haughty like the Duchess of Guermantes in the Bois de Boulogne, and who made you think of Céleste Albaret as she’d appeared one night on television with Bernard Pivot
...
the stranger of Termini Station in Rome, who half lowered the blind of his first-class compartment and in profile, hidden from the waist up, dandled his sex in the direction of the young women in the train on the opposite platform, leaning against the railings, chins in hands
the guy in a cinema ad for Paic Vaisselle dishwashing liquid, cheerfully breaking dirty dishes instead of washing them while an offscreen voice sternly intoned ‘That is not the solution!’ and the man, gazing at the audience in despair, asked ‘But what is the solution?’
...
the images, real or imaginary, that follow us all the way into sleep
the images of a moment bathed in a light that is theirs alone
They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.
The narration then switches to impressions of World War II, for the narrator not actual but received memories, imbibed during family get togethers:
The voices of the guests flowed together to compose the great narrative of collective events, which we came to believe we too had witnessed.
They never grew tired of talking about the winter of '42, the bone-chilling cold, the hunger and the swedes, the food provisions and the tobacco vouchers, the bombardments
the aurora borealis that heralded the coming of the war
the bicycles and carts on the road during the Debacle
the looted shops
the displaced searching the debris for their photos and their money
the arrival of the Germans - every person at the table could say exactly where, in what city - and the always courteous English, the inconsiderate Americans, the collabos, the neighbour in the resistance, X's daughter whose head was shaved after the Liberation
Le Havre razed to the ground, where nothing remained, the black market
Propaganda
the Krauts fleeing across the Seine at Caudebec on knackered horses
the countrywoman who loudly farted in a train compartment full of Germans and proclaimed to all and sundry, 'If we can't tell it, we can make them smell it!'
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.
But they only spoke of what they had see and could re-live while eating and drinking. They lacked the talent and conviction to speak of things they'd been aware of but had not seen. Not the Jewish children boarding trains for Auschwitz, nor the bodies of starvation victims collected every morning from the Warsaw ghetto, nor the 10,000 degree fires in Hiroshima. Hence our impression, which later history courses, documentaries and films failed to dispel, that neither the crematoria nor the atomic bomb belong to the same era as black market butter, air-raid warnings, and descents to the cellar.
The line "everything was told in the 'we' voice and with impersonal pronouns, as if everyone were equally affected by events" is key to Ernaux's own style in the book:
There is no "I" in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only "one" and "we," as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time before.
The narrative is largely based on Ernaux's own life but she uses 'we' (*) not 'I', or 'she' when specifically referring to herself: her personal memories (auto) are used to both tell her own life story and her evolution as a writer, but also to describe the collective experience (biography) of her friends and indeed the generation of French women to which she belongs (and perhaps social class, ethnic group and artistic inclination as well), which in turn also becomes a (sociological) history of France itself - hence the auto-socio-biography.
(* as an aside, I believe the French original uses 'on' heavily, but Strayer has sensible avoids the use of 'one' in English, which would have conveyed a rather different impression)
Ernaux is the same Le Monde interview also argued that the use of "elle" rather than "je" actually allowed her a certain distancing and so to be more open about things that might other seem personally shameful:
J'ai l'impression que je la déjoue par une manière d'écrire impersonnelle, une façon de mettre à distance l'inavouable. J'ai pu parler pour la première fois de mes fils dans Les Années (Gallimard, 2008) parce que je disais "elle" et pas "je."
Another distinctive feature is how, in Ernaux's account, as is true in reality for most people, political events are often mere background, simply marking the turning of the years in much the same way as does, in another thread, the winner of each year's Tour de France. The story of France in the second half of the 20th Century is instead told, effectively, with the personal:
It is with the perception and sensations received by the spectacled fourteen-and-a-half-year-old brunette that writing is able to retrieve here something slipping through the 1950s, to capture the reflection that collective history projects upon the screen of individual memory.
This reference to "the spectacled fourteen-and-a-half-year-old brunette" is from a described photo and Ernaux applies an inversion of the Sebaldian technique. Where he included, often uncommented, photos in his text, often ones he had discovered in junk shops but which fitted his narration, she often starts a new era of reminiscence with a photograph from her family album (later in the book, videos), but one described verbally to rather than physically seen by the reader. For example another photo taken by her young husband on a Sunday lunchtime:
In a photo taken indoors, a close-up in black and white, a young woman and a little boy sit side by side on a single bed, fitted out cushions to make a sofa. Behind them is a window with sheer curtains. An African artefact hangs on the wall. The woman wears an outfit in pale jersey, a twin set and a skirt just above the knee. Her hair, parted in dark asymmetrical bands, accentuates the full oval of her face. Her cheekbones are lifted in a big smile. Neither her hairstyle nor her outfit corresponds to the images one later saw of 1966 or 1967. Only the short skirt is consistent with the fashion launched by Mary Quant.
...
On the back is written 'Rue Loverchy, Winter '67.'
...
As lunch simmers flagrantly on the stove, and the babbling child assembled Lego blocks, and the toliet flusher is repaired while Bach's Musical Offering plays in the background, they build their collective sense, all in all, of being happy. The photo plays a role in this construction, anchoring their 'little family in the long term. It acts as a pledge of permanence for the child's grandparents, who will receive a copy.
Literature also plays an important role, another way to chart both the passing years (a wonderfully pithy passage on the fall of the Soviet Union The USSR, which we no longer thought about, shook the summer awake with a half-baked coup by old Stalinist fogies. Gorbachev was discredited, chaos declared and dismissed within hours, all because of a beady-eyed brute who, by some miracle, had clambered onto a tank and been hailed as the hero of freedom, concludes Leningrad was St Petersburg again, much more convenient for finding one's way around the novels of Dostoevsky) but also of the evolving taste as she matures.
For example, in the lead in to the student revolution in Paris of May 1968, one of the few events that really does impact on daily life:
Television, with its fixed iconography and minimal cast of actors, would institute a 'ne varietur' version of events, the unalterable impression that all of us had been eighteen to twenty-five that year and hurled cobblestones at the riot police, handkerchiefs pressed to our mouths. Bombarded by the recurrent camera images, we suppressed those of our own May ’68, neither momentous – the deserted Place de la Gare on a Sunday, no passengers, no newspapers in the kiosks – nor glorious – one day when we were afraid of lacking money, petrol, and especially food, rushing to the bank to withdraw cash and filling a cart to overflowing at Carrefour, from an inherited memory of hunger.
It was a spring like any other, sleet in April, Easter late. We’d followed the Winter Olympics with Jean-Claude Killy, read Elise, or The Real Life, proudly changed the R8 for a Fiat sedan, started Candide with the première students and paid only vague attention to the unrest at Paris universities, reported on the radio.
But the Sorbonne closed, the written exams for the CAPES were cancelled, and students clashed with police. One night, we heard breathless voices on Europe 1. There were barricades in the Latin Quarter, as in Algiers ten years earlier, Molotov cocktails and wounded. Now we were aware that something was happening and did not feel like returning to life as usual the next day.
The reference to the events in Paris in 1968 (my birth year), which were not particularly echoed in the UK, emphasises the point that the book can't help but read differently to an Englishman of a younger generation than to a Frenchwoman of Ernaux's own, the national differences in terms of references to celebrities, adverts and branded products perhaps most noticeable: there is less of nod of constant recognition as there would be to Ernaux's own compatriots. However, the experience is equally effective, indeed it is fascinating to see which things are common and which different.
Strayer makes effective although very sparing use of footnotes (just 29 in the 227 page book), for example to explain that CAPES in the quote above is the Certificat d’aptitude au professeur de l’enseignement du second degré, the secondary teachers’ training certificate. Indeed at times I wondered why one particular cultural reference was explained out of a dozen in the same paragraph, although I suspect cases where Google would not help may be one reason. An interview and article with Strayer reported:
And a final impressive feature of the novel, and a thread that runs through it, is Ernaux charting her developing thoughts on writing a book of her life, the book that eventually we are now reading. Her preferred form evolves from a Proust-like tome, to, this its final form:
It will be a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes, all the way to the final image of a life. An outpouring, but suspended at regular intervals by photos and scenes from films that capture the successive body shapes and social positions of her being–freeze-frames on memories, and at the same time reports on the development of her existence, the things that have made it singular, not because of the nature of the elements of her life, whether external (social trajectory, profession) or internal (thoughts and aspirations, the desire to write), but because of their combinations, each unique unto itself. To this ‘incessantly other’ of photos will correspond, in mirror image, the ‘she’ of writing. There is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we’, as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.
Highly recommended and definite shortlist material for me for the MBI, indeed it would make a worthy winner.
Book 2/13 for me from the Man Booker International 2019 longlist
She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day. Therefore, an existence that is singular but also merged with the movements of a generation. Each time she begins, she meets the same obstacles: how to represent the passage of historical time, the changing of things, ideas and manners, and the private life of this woman? How to make the fresco of forty-five years coincide with the search for a self outside of History.
The Years, translated from Annie Ernaux's 2008 original (Les années) by Alison L. Strayer, is yet another masterpiece brought to English language readers by the UK's finest publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions.
The Years is a narrative of France from 1940 (Ernaux's birth) to 2006 told in "an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes", and in the unique auto-socio-biography style that she has developed. Ernaux herself has been always keen to emphasise that everything in the books is true:
la seule écriture juste m'a paru être le refus de toute fiction et ce que j'ai appelé ensuite "l'autosociobiographie" parce que je me fonde presque toujours sur un rapport de soi à la réalité sociohistorique.and indeed The Years might perhaps best be described as a 'novel without fiction' as Javier Cercas describes many of his books in his essay (tr. Anne McLean) The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Novel, including his The Impostor (tr. Frank Wynne), a book also longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, a prize for 'novels and short-stories'. Indeed Les années was published as 'un roman' in France but The Years under Fitzcarraldo's white covers (usually for essays) here, although UK ISBN registration covers 'essay', 'memoir', and 'literary fiction in translation', and the MBI judges are to be congratulated for acknowledging its eligibility.
https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article...
(translation: the only writing that seemed fair to me was that which refused fiction altogether, which I later called autosociobiographie because I nearly always placed myself at the meeting of self and sociohistorical reality.)
The Years opens with a collage of images and memories from throughout the period of which below are a sample
All the images will disappear:
the woman who squatted to urinate in broad daylight, behind the shack that served coffee at the edge of the ruins in Yvetot, after the war, who stood, skirts lifted, to pull up her underwear and then returned to the café
the tearful face of Alida Valli as she danced with Georges Wilson in the film The Long Absence
...
the majesty of the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, who wore a flowered smock like all the residents of the old folks’ home, but with a blue shawl over her shoulders, tirelessly pacing the corridors, haughty like the Duchess of Guermantes in the Bois de Boulogne, and who made you think of Céleste Albaret as she’d appeared one night on television with Bernard Pivot
...
the stranger of Termini Station in Rome, who half lowered the blind of his first-class compartment and in profile, hidden from the waist up, dandled his sex in the direction of the young women in the train on the opposite platform, leaning against the railings, chins in hands
the guy in a cinema ad for Paic Vaisselle dishwashing liquid, cheerfully breaking dirty dishes instead of washing them while an offscreen voice sternly intoned ‘That is not the solution!’ and the man, gazing at the audience in despair, asked ‘But what is the solution?’
...
the images, real or imaginary, that follow us all the way into sleep
the images of a moment bathed in a light that is theirs alone
They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.
The narration then switches to impressions of World War II, for the narrator not actual but received memories, imbibed during family get togethers:
The voices of the guests flowed together to compose the great narrative of collective events, which we came to believe we too had witnessed.
They never grew tired of talking about the winter of '42, the bone-chilling cold, the hunger and the swedes, the food provisions and the tobacco vouchers, the bombardments
the aurora borealis that heralded the coming of the war
the bicycles and carts on the road during the Debacle
the looted shops
the displaced searching the debris for their photos and their money
the arrival of the Germans - every person at the table could say exactly where, in what city - and the always courteous English, the inconsiderate Americans, the collabos, the neighbour in the resistance, X's daughter whose head was shaved after the Liberation
Le Havre razed to the ground, where nothing remained, the black market
Propaganda
the Krauts fleeing across the Seine at Caudebec on knackered horses
the countrywoman who loudly farted in a train compartment full of Germans and proclaimed to all and sundry, 'If we can't tell it, we can make them smell it!'
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.
But they only spoke of what they had see and could re-live while eating and drinking. They lacked the talent and conviction to speak of things they'd been aware of but had not seen. Not the Jewish children boarding trains for Auschwitz, nor the bodies of starvation victims collected every morning from the Warsaw ghetto, nor the 10,000 degree fires in Hiroshima. Hence our impression, which later history courses, documentaries and films failed to dispel, that neither the crematoria nor the atomic bomb belong to the same era as black market butter, air-raid warnings, and descents to the cellar.
The line "everything was told in the 'we' voice and with impersonal pronouns, as if everyone were equally affected by events" is key to Ernaux's own style in the book:
There is no "I" in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only "one" and "we," as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time before.
The narrative is largely based on Ernaux's own life but she uses 'we' (*) not 'I', or 'she' when specifically referring to herself: her personal memories (auto) are used to both tell her own life story and her evolution as a writer, but also to describe the collective experience (biography) of her friends and indeed the generation of French women to which she belongs (and perhaps social class, ethnic group and artistic inclination as well), which in turn also becomes a (sociological) history of France itself - hence the auto-socio-biography.
(* as an aside, I believe the French original uses 'on' heavily, but Strayer has sensible avoids the use of 'one' in English, which would have conveyed a rather different impression)
Ernaux is the same Le Monde interview also argued that the use of "elle" rather than "je" actually allowed her a certain distancing and so to be more open about things that might other seem personally shameful:
J'ai l'impression que je la déjoue par une manière d'écrire impersonnelle, une façon de mettre à distance l'inavouable. J'ai pu parler pour la première fois de mes fils dans Les Années (Gallimard, 2008) parce que je disais "elle" et pas "je."
Another distinctive feature is how, in Ernaux's account, as is true in reality for most people, political events are often mere background, simply marking the turning of the years in much the same way as does, in another thread, the winner of each year's Tour de France. The story of France in the second half of the 20th Century is instead told, effectively, with the personal:
It is with the perception and sensations received by the spectacled fourteen-and-a-half-year-old brunette that writing is able to retrieve here something slipping through the 1950s, to capture the reflection that collective history projects upon the screen of individual memory.
This reference to "the spectacled fourteen-and-a-half-year-old brunette" is from a described photo and Ernaux applies an inversion of the Sebaldian technique. Where he included, often uncommented, photos in his text, often ones he had discovered in junk shops but which fitted his narration, she often starts a new era of reminiscence with a photograph from her family album (later in the book, videos), but one described verbally to rather than physically seen by the reader. For example another photo taken by her young husband on a Sunday lunchtime:
In a photo taken indoors, a close-up in black and white, a young woman and a little boy sit side by side on a single bed, fitted out cushions to make a sofa. Behind them is a window with sheer curtains. An African artefact hangs on the wall. The woman wears an outfit in pale jersey, a twin set and a skirt just above the knee. Her hair, parted in dark asymmetrical bands, accentuates the full oval of her face. Her cheekbones are lifted in a big smile. Neither her hairstyle nor her outfit corresponds to the images one later saw of 1966 or 1967. Only the short skirt is consistent with the fashion launched by Mary Quant.
...
On the back is written 'Rue Loverchy, Winter '67.'
...
As lunch simmers flagrantly on the stove, and the babbling child assembled Lego blocks, and the toliet flusher is repaired while Bach's Musical Offering plays in the background, they build their collective sense, all in all, of being happy. The photo plays a role in this construction, anchoring their 'little family in the long term. It acts as a pledge of permanence for the child's grandparents, who will receive a copy.
Literature also plays an important role, another way to chart both the passing years (a wonderfully pithy passage on the fall of the Soviet Union The USSR, which we no longer thought about, shook the summer awake with a half-baked coup by old Stalinist fogies. Gorbachev was discredited, chaos declared and dismissed within hours, all because of a beady-eyed brute who, by some miracle, had clambered onto a tank and been hailed as the hero of freedom, concludes Leningrad was St Petersburg again, much more convenient for finding one's way around the novels of Dostoevsky) but also of the evolving taste as she matures.
For example, in the lead in to the student revolution in Paris of May 1968, one of the few events that really does impact on daily life:
Television, with its fixed iconography and minimal cast of actors, would institute a 'ne varietur' version of events, the unalterable impression that all of us had been eighteen to twenty-five that year and hurled cobblestones at the riot police, handkerchiefs pressed to our mouths. Bombarded by the recurrent camera images, we suppressed those of our own May ’68, neither momentous – the deserted Place de la Gare on a Sunday, no passengers, no newspapers in the kiosks – nor glorious – one day when we were afraid of lacking money, petrol, and especially food, rushing to the bank to withdraw cash and filling a cart to overflowing at Carrefour, from an inherited memory of hunger.
It was a spring like any other, sleet in April, Easter late. We’d followed the Winter Olympics with Jean-Claude Killy, read Elise, or The Real Life, proudly changed the R8 for a Fiat sedan, started Candide with the première students and paid only vague attention to the unrest at Paris universities, reported on the radio.
But the Sorbonne closed, the written exams for the CAPES were cancelled, and students clashed with police. One night, we heard breathless voices on Europe 1. There were barricades in the Latin Quarter, as in Algiers ten years earlier, Molotov cocktails and wounded. Now we were aware that something was happening and did not feel like returning to life as usual the next day.
The reference to the events in Paris in 1968 (my birth year), which were not particularly echoed in the UK, emphasises the point that the book can't help but read differently to an Englishman of a younger generation than to a Frenchwoman of Ernaux's own, the national differences in terms of references to celebrities, adverts and branded products perhaps most noticeable: there is less of nod of constant recognition as there would be to Ernaux's own compatriots. However, the experience is equally effective, indeed it is fascinating to see which things are common and which different.
Strayer makes effective although very sparing use of footnotes (just 29 in the 227 page book), for example to explain that CAPES in the quote above is the Certificat d’aptitude au professeur de l’enseignement du second degré, the secondary teachers’ training certificate. Indeed at times I wondered why one particular cultural reference was explained out of a dozen in the same paragraph, although I suspect cases where Google would not help may be one reason. An interview and article with Strayer reported:
Strayer has learned some tricks along the way, including visits to some of Monsieur Google’s more obscure domains. It also helps to be living in Paris with a French husband whose family could apparently win any French Trivial Pursuit contest.https://artsfile.ca/ex-pat-ottawa-tra...
“I had only to present a snippet of a popular song, an advertising jingle, joke or spoonerism, a quip from a ‘50s comedian, whatever the case, and someone would promptly recite it in full and provide necessary explanations,” Strayer said in a recent email interview.
And a final impressive feature of the novel, and a thread that runs through it, is Ernaux charting her developing thoughts on writing a book of her life, the book that eventually we are now reading. Her preferred form evolves from a Proust-like tome, to, this its final form:
It will be a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes, all the way to the final image of a life. An outpouring, but suspended at regular intervals by photos and scenes from films that capture the successive body shapes and social positions of her being–freeze-frames on memories, and at the same time reports on the development of her existence, the things that have made it singular, not because of the nature of the elements of her life, whether external (social trajectory, profession) or internal (thoughts and aspirations, the desire to write), but because of their combinations, each unique unto itself. To this ‘incessantly other’ of photos will correspond, in mirror image, the ‘she’ of writing. There is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we’, as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.
Highly recommended and definite shortlist material for me for the MBI, indeed it would make a worthy winner.
October 14, 2022
Satın alıp ama bir yıldan fazladır okuyamadığım bu kitabı, Ernaux’ya Nobel ödülünün verilmesi vesilesiyle sonunda elime alabildim. Müthiş ve farklı bir kitap. Kişisel, toplumsal ve siyasal tarihin etkileyici bir şekilde harmanlandığı bir anlatı. 1940’lardan 2000’li yıllara yaşananlara, dönüşümlere ışık tutan bir metin. Belki biraz fazla Fransız ama işlenen temalar evrensel; dolayısıyla Fransız tarihine, kültürüne yabancı olmanız kitaptan aldığınız zevki pek etkilemiyor.
“Bütün görüntüler yok olup gidecek” diye başlayıp, “Artık asla olmayacağımız zamandan bir şey kurtarmak” diye bitiriyor. “Kolektif tarihin bireysel hafızanın
perdesine aksettirdiği yansımayı”, “şimdi her şeyden çok istediği, artık bir daha göremeyeceğimiz yüzlere vuran ışığı yakalamak, yok olmuş yiyeceklerle dolu sofralara vuran, çocukluğunun pazar anlatılarında orada olan, yaşanmış şeylerin üzerine her daim vurmaya devam eden o ışığı, kadim ışığı” yakalamaya, kurtarmaya çalıştığını yazıyor ve bunu harika bir şekilde başarıyor Ernaux.
Muazzam bir tüketim toplumu eleştirisi de var:
“İnsanlarin, sahip olduklar nesneler sayesinde hayatlarının iyileştiğine ve güzelleştiğine inancı gitgide artıyordu.”
“Gittikçe daha hızlı ve daha çok yeni şeyin hayatımıza girmesi, geçmisi geriye atıyordu. İnsanlar bütün bu nesnelerin bir işe yarayıp yaramadığını, onlara ihtiyaç duyup duymadıklarını sorgulamıyor, sadece sahip olmayı arzuluyor ve hepsini derhal almaya yetecek kadar para kazanamamanın sıkıntısını çekiyorlardı.”
“Şeylerin bolluğu, fikirlerin kıtl��ğını ve inançların aşınmasını gizliyordu.”
Bu konularla sınırlı değil tabii, daha da fazlası (kadın olmak, anne olmak, cinsellik, kuşaklar arası farklılıklar, aile dinamikleri, toplumsal hafızanın seyri, göçmenlik, terör… vs) var kitapta. Okuyun derim. Siren İdemen’in çevirisi de çok iyi.
“Bütün görüntüler yok olup gidecek” diye başlayıp, “Artık asla olmayacağımız zamandan bir şey kurtarmak” diye bitiriyor. “Kolektif tarihin bireysel hafızanın
perdesine aksettirdiği yansımayı”, “şimdi her şeyden çok istediği, artık bir daha göremeyeceğimiz yüzlere vuran ışığı yakalamak, yok olmuş yiyeceklerle dolu sofralara vuran, çocukluğunun pazar anlatılarında orada olan, yaşanmış şeylerin üzerine her daim vurmaya devam eden o ışığı, kadim ışığı” yakalamaya, kurtarmaya çalıştığını yazıyor ve bunu harika bir şekilde başarıyor Ernaux.
Muazzam bir tüketim toplumu eleştirisi de var:
“İnsanlarin, sahip olduklar nesneler sayesinde hayatlarının iyileştiğine ve güzelleştiğine inancı gitgide artıyordu.”
“Gittikçe daha hızlı ve daha çok yeni şeyin hayatımıza girmesi, geçmisi geriye atıyordu. İnsanlar bütün bu nesnelerin bir işe yarayıp yaramadığını, onlara ihtiyaç duyup duymadıklarını sorgulamıyor, sadece sahip olmayı arzuluyor ve hepsini derhal almaya yetecek kadar para kazanamamanın sıkıntısını çekiyorlardı.”
“Şeylerin bolluğu, fikirlerin kıtl��ğını ve inançların aşınmasını gizliyordu.”
Bu konularla sınırlı değil tabii, daha da fazlası (kadın olmak, anne olmak, cinsellik, kuşaklar arası farklılıklar, aile dinamikleri, toplumsal hafızanın seyri, göçmenlik, terör… vs) var kitapta. Okuyun derim. Siren İdemen’in çevirisi de çok iyi.
April 1, 2020
I couldn't decide between a 3 and a 5 rating. This book took me so long to read because it never grabbed me, but it had moments of such poignancy and beauty. I do think it's a great book even if pages passed without making an impression. I would only recommend this to people who are interested in form- it completely accomplishes the goal of writing a personal memoir and general history without referring to oneself (using "me" or "I"). It reads more like long-form prose to me, like flipping through a scrapbook, which is a nice effect. But I don't recommend it if you're looking for a story. It is too fragmented and reliant on lists and cursory explanations to be a page turner. Interesting but not engaging.
October 21, 2018
«Sto per compiere cinquant'anni, sarebbe ora di sapere chi sono.»
Annie Ernaux abbandona l'autobiografico intimista per sconfinare nell'autobiografia collettiva e farsi coro, voce narrante di un'epoca.
L'io diventa noi, le foto in bianco e nero di famiglia, che la ritraggono in varie fasi della vita sin da quand'era bambina, fino al passaggio a quelle a colori (e dai filmini super8 alle cassette Vhs) riflettono la sua storia individuale e al tempo stesso diventano specchio dei mutamenti collettivi della Francia e del popolo francese.
Dal secondo dopoguerra, durante il quale, dopo un primo momento di choc, tutti, vecchie e nuove generazioni, hanno fretta di sbarazzarsi dei ricordi dei tempi di guerra come colti da una postuma amnesia collettiva, agli anni del benessere e della modernità e del materialismo e dal senso smisurato e salvifico del possedere e accumulare cose - «eravamo presi da un desiderio assillante di comprare, come se l'acquisto di una cialdiera elettrica o di una lampada giapponese dovesse fare di noi esseri differenti» -, in primis la TV, che entra con prepotenza in tutte le case - Era finita l'epoca dell'ingenuità sociale, e la televisione entrava in tutte le case - Solo i fatti mostrati in televisione davano accesso alla realtà - "l'ha detto la TV" - al post colonialismo e alle rivolte nelle banlieu dei beurs, che pone di fronte a un esame di coscienza sociale e individuale, dal Maggio francese a Charlie Hebdo in ogni casa della bourgeoisie, dall'Algeria e al Vietnam, dalla caduta del Muro all'ex Jugoslavia e all'ex Unione Sovietica, dalle guerre del Golfo all'11 settembre - a New York era mattina, ma per noi sarebbe per sempre rimasto pomeriggio - da Giscard d'Estaing a François Mitterand, da Jospin a Le Pen, dalla conquista e alla scoperta di ogni donna della propria capacità di autonomia nella società e nella famiglia, dalla pillola al divorzio e alla libertà sessuale, dall'aborto alla maternità, dalla lunghezza delle gonne che si accorciano e si allungano allo stesso modo in cui si accorciano e si allungano i capelli, dall'ecologismo all'Euro e alla globalizzazione, dalla Storia che passa per le storie, dall'io passando per il noi, Annie Ernaux tratteggia l'autobiografia di un popolo intero.
E la sua scrittura è anche qui, ancora una volta come nello splendido Il posto (ma anche nel tessere nuovamente il filo che lo unisce a L'onta e agli altri suoi scritti, che hanno sempre una matrice autobiografica, come Gli armadi vuoti) una scrittura analitica, tagliente, distaccata, chirurgica, che impietosamente, ma con un filo di asciutta nostalgia, (auto)critica il progressivo allontanamento dalle antiche aspirazioni sociali e, nell'imborghesimento, la dimenticanza delle origini: la memoria si faceva più corta, il legame con il passato si faceva sfocato. Trasmettevamo - ammette Annie Ernaux - solo il presente.
Gli avvenimenti storici, pagina dopo pagina, anno dopo anno, le rivolte sociali, i fatti di cronaca, si legano e si collegano come un filo invisibile alla sua vita: l'adolescenza, l'università, l'aborto, il matrimonio, i figli, la morte del padre, il divorzio, l'insegnamento, la solitudine, la malattia della madre, i nuovi amori, la scrittura, questo libro, gli anni.
Alla decisione di salvare le circostanze narrando quegli anni, quella di restituire, ritrovando la memoria della memoria collettiva in una memoria individuale, la dimensione vissuta della Storia.
«Sarà una narrzione scivolosa, in un perfetto continuo, assoluto, che divori via via il presente fino all'ultima immagine di una vita. Un fluire interrotto, tuttavia, da foto e sequenze di filmati che a intervalli regolari coglieranno la forma corporea e le posizioni sociali successive del suo essere, fermi-immagine della memoria e allo stesso tempo resoconti sull'evoluzione della sua esistenza, ciò che l'ha resa singolare, non in virtù degli elementi esterni della sua vita (traiettoria sociale, profesione) o di quelli interni (pensieri e aspirazioni, desiderio di scrivere), ma per la combinazione degli uni e degli altri, unica in ciascun individuo. A questo «continuamente altro» delle foto corrisponderà, a specchio, il «lei» della scrittura».
In quella che vede come una sorta di autobiografia impersonale non ci sarà nessun «io», ma un «si» e un «noi», come se anche lei, a sua volta, svolgesse il racconto dei tempi andati.»
Tutto questo fa de Gli anni un memoir molto francese, molto europeo, molto privato, interamente nostro.
E di Annie Ernaux, per me - come ripeto ormai a tutti e ovunque - la miglior scoperta fatta nel 2014 insieme a Patrick Modiano.
«Erano in pochi / su tutta la terra / ognuno si credeva solo /furono folla a un tratto.»
[Paul Éluard]
Annie Ernaux abbandona l'autobiografico intimista per sconfinare nell'autobiografia collettiva e farsi coro, voce narrante di un'epoca.
L'io diventa noi, le foto in bianco e nero di famiglia, che la ritraggono in varie fasi della vita sin da quand'era bambina, fino al passaggio a quelle a colori (e dai filmini super8 alle cassette Vhs) riflettono la sua storia individuale e al tempo stesso diventano specchio dei mutamenti collettivi della Francia e del popolo francese.
Dal secondo dopoguerra, durante il quale, dopo un primo momento di choc, tutti, vecchie e nuove generazioni, hanno fretta di sbarazzarsi dei ricordi dei tempi di guerra come colti da una postuma amnesia collettiva, agli anni del benessere e della modernità e del materialismo e dal senso smisurato e salvifico del possedere e accumulare cose - «eravamo presi da un desiderio assillante di comprare, come se l'acquisto di una cialdiera elettrica o di una lampada giapponese dovesse fare di noi esseri differenti» -, in primis la TV, che entra con prepotenza in tutte le case - Era finita l'epoca dell'ingenuità sociale, e la televisione entrava in tutte le case - Solo i fatti mostrati in televisione davano accesso alla realtà - "l'ha detto la TV" - al post colonialismo e alle rivolte nelle banlieu dei beurs, che pone di fronte a un esame di coscienza sociale e individuale, dal Maggio francese a Charlie Hebdo in ogni casa della bourgeoisie, dall'Algeria e al Vietnam, dalla caduta del Muro all'ex Jugoslavia e all'ex Unione Sovietica, dalle guerre del Golfo all'11 settembre - a New York era mattina, ma per noi sarebbe per sempre rimasto pomeriggio - da Giscard d'Estaing a François Mitterand, da Jospin a Le Pen, dalla conquista e alla scoperta di ogni donna della propria capacità di autonomia nella società e nella famiglia, dalla pillola al divorzio e alla libertà sessuale, dall'aborto alla maternità, dalla lunghezza delle gonne che si accorciano e si allungano allo stesso modo in cui si accorciano e si allungano i capelli, dall'ecologismo all'Euro e alla globalizzazione, dalla Storia che passa per le storie, dall'io passando per il noi, Annie Ernaux tratteggia l'autobiografia di un popolo intero.
E la sua scrittura è anche qui, ancora una volta come nello splendido Il posto (ma anche nel tessere nuovamente il filo che lo unisce a L'onta e agli altri suoi scritti, che hanno sempre una matrice autobiografica, come Gli armadi vuoti) una scrittura analitica, tagliente, distaccata, chirurgica, che impietosamente, ma con un filo di asciutta nostalgia, (auto)critica il progressivo allontanamento dalle antiche aspirazioni sociali e, nell'imborghesimento, la dimenticanza delle origini: la memoria si faceva più corta, il legame con il passato si faceva sfocato. Trasmettevamo - ammette Annie Ernaux - solo il presente.
Gli avvenimenti storici, pagina dopo pagina, anno dopo anno, le rivolte sociali, i fatti di cronaca, si legano e si collegano come un filo invisibile alla sua vita: l'adolescenza, l'università, l'aborto, il matrimonio, i figli, la morte del padre, il divorzio, l'insegnamento, la solitudine, la malattia della madre, i nuovi amori, la scrittura, questo libro, gli anni.
Alla decisione di salvare le circostanze narrando quegli anni, quella di restituire, ritrovando la memoria della memoria collettiva in una memoria individuale, la dimensione vissuta della Storia.
«Sarà una narrzione scivolosa, in un perfetto continuo, assoluto, che divori via via il presente fino all'ultima immagine di una vita. Un fluire interrotto, tuttavia, da foto e sequenze di filmati che a intervalli regolari coglieranno la forma corporea e le posizioni sociali successive del suo essere, fermi-immagine della memoria e allo stesso tempo resoconti sull'evoluzione della sua esistenza, ciò che l'ha resa singolare, non in virtù degli elementi esterni della sua vita (traiettoria sociale, profesione) o di quelli interni (pensieri e aspirazioni, desiderio di scrivere), ma per la combinazione degli uni e degli altri, unica in ciascun individuo. A questo «continuamente altro» delle foto corrisponderà, a specchio, il «lei» della scrittura».
In quella che vede come una sorta di autobiografia impersonale non ci sarà nessun «io», ma un «si» e un «noi», come se anche lei, a sua volta, svolgesse il racconto dei tempi andati.»
Tutto questo fa de Gli anni un memoir molto francese, molto europeo, molto privato, interamente nostro.
E di Annie Ernaux, per me - come ripeto ormai a tutti e ovunque - la miglior scoperta fatta nel 2014 insieme a Patrick Modiano.
«Erano in pochi / su tutta la terra / ognuno si credeva solo /furono folla a un tratto.»
[Paul Éluard]
September 28, 2023
To exist is to drink oneself without thirst.
Reading The Years is like watching one of those short videos, showing the evolution of dance or fashion throughout history.
Our memory is outside us, in a rainy breath of time.
We read the book, as if we are looking at photos and scenes, captured successively in different stages of Annie’s life; as if we are reading news reports about social, economic and political events; events which made an impression on her external and internal self.
Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.
The Years is freeze-frames of Annie’s memories and her existence; a memoir of one and all.
She begins a novel in which images past and present, her dreams at night and visions of the future, alternate with an “I” who is her double, detached from herself.
There are no chapters, but at the beginning of each decade, she offers and describes a photograph of herself, as a little baby, a child, a teenager, etc. Of course as she always does, she talks about herself in third person.
There is no “I” in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only “one” and “we,” as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.
This is a writing project of a woman who has lived between 1940 and today, convinced that she has no “personality”.
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.
She wants to save everything that has been part of her life; she wants to save her “circumstance”.
The distance that separates past from present can be measured perhaps by the light that spills across the ground between shadows, slips over faces, outlines the folds of a dress- by the twilight clarity of a black-and-white photo, no matter what time it is taken.
She wants to hunt down the sensations inside of her; sensations like the ones that make her write.
Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.
Reading The Years is like watching one of those short videos, showing the evolution of dance or fashion throughout history.
Our memory is outside us, in a rainy breath of time.
We read the book, as if we are looking at photos and scenes, captured successively in different stages of Annie’s life; as if we are reading news reports about social, economic and political events; events which made an impression on her external and internal self.
Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.
The Years is freeze-frames of Annie’s memories and her existence; a memoir of one and all.
She begins a novel in which images past and present, her dreams at night and visions of the future, alternate with an “I” who is her double, detached from herself.
There are no chapters, but at the beginning of each decade, she offers and describes a photograph of herself, as a little baby, a child, a teenager, etc. Of course as she always does, she talks about herself in third person.
There is no “I” in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only “one” and “we,” as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time-before.
This is a writing project of a woman who has lived between 1940 and today, convinced that she has no “personality”.
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.
She wants to save everything that has been part of her life; she wants to save her “circumstance”.
The distance that separates past from present can be measured perhaps by the light that spills across the ground between shadows, slips over faces, outlines the folds of a dress- by the twilight clarity of a black-and-white photo, no matter what time it is taken.
She wants to hunt down the sensations inside of her; sensations like the ones that make her write.
Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.
October 6, 2022
Dit is geen raam-maar mozaïekvertelling, een geschiedenisles, een duik in ons tijdperk, een dagboek van een samenleving, een schatkist voor komende generaties. Dit is het equivalent van een schilderij wat je heel lang van dichtbij bekijkt terwijl je langzaamaan stapjes terugzet. Aan het eind zie je dat alle puntjes, strepen, vlekken en vegen een gesamtkunstwerk vormen: een canvas van duizenden details waarbij de kunstenaar in het zichzelf wegcijferen haar eigen contouren toont, zoals Borges in zijn gedicht:
Gezeten voor een muur - en niets belet
ons deze als oneindig te verbeelden -
Bereidt een man paletten en penselen
Om op de witte kalkmuur nauwgezet
De wereld af te beelden, lijn voor lijn:
Weegschalen, deuren, ankers, hyacinten,
Engelen, boekerijen, labyrinten,
't Oneindig groot en het oneindig klein.
Hij doet de vormen op de muur verrijzen.
Het lot, dat vreemde gunsten toe kan wijzen,
Vergunt hem de voltooiing van zijn daad.
Vlak voor zijn dood - zijn allerlaatste tel -
Ontdekt hij in 't immense lijnenspel
De exacte beeltenis van zijn gelaat.
Jorge Luis Borges
Gezeten voor een muur - en niets belet
ons deze als oneindig te verbeelden -
Bereidt een man paletten en penselen
Om op de witte kalkmuur nauwgezet
De wereld af te beelden, lijn voor lijn:
Weegschalen, deuren, ankers, hyacinten,
Engelen, boekerijen, labyrinten,
't Oneindig groot en het oneindig klein.
Hij doet de vormen op de muur verrijzen.
Het lot, dat vreemde gunsten toe kan wijzen,
Vergunt hem de voltooiing van zijn daad.
Vlak voor zijn dood - zijn allerlaatste tel -
Ontdekt hij in 't immense lijnenspel
De exacte beeltenis van zijn gelaat.
Jorge Luis Borges
October 14, 2022
Annie Erno, the literary Nobel of this year and the case when you feel grateful to academics: if it were not for their choice, I would not have recognized this writer and this book. The peculiarity of Erno the writer is the small volume of works, she is not one of those who pack the treasures of her wisdom in folios. A book that you spend an evening on has a better chance of being read than a thick novel.
"Years" will take about as much time and are written in such a way that reading is really like watching a social network feed: you squander, immerse yourself in the text as in a video, finding yourself among things, objects, names, ideas, prejudices, emotions, feelings, duties, privileges of one piece of reality. You scroll further and the picture around completely changes. Erno is able to fill a small volume of a separate fragment with meaningful content as tightly as possible, connecting the history of progress, politics, culture with the stages of a woman's life.
A world in which the narrator occupies no less and no more space than everything else. The equivalence of man and history.
Женщина и утраченное время
Вся наша взрослая жизнь прошла при власти, которая не имела к нам никакого отношения, и двадцать три года казались единой безнадежной текучей массой, откуда не вышло ничего удачного в смысле политики. Мы ощущали такую досаду, словно у нас украли часть юности.
Анни Эрно, литературный Нобель нынешнего года и тот случай, когда к академикам испытываешь благодарность: если бы не их выбор, не узнала бы этой писательницы и этой книги. Одна из особенностей Эрно-писателя малый объем произведений, она не из тех, кто пакует сокровища своей мудрости в тысячестраничные кирпичи. В современности все больше тяготеюще к скроллингу и клиповости, у книги, на которую потратишь вечер, больше шансов быть прочитанной, чем у толстого романа.
"Годы" возьмут примерно столько по времени и написаны так, что чтение, вправду, похоже на просмотр ленты соцсети: проматываешь, погружаешься в текст как в ролик, оказываясь среди вещей, предметов, имен, идей, предрассудков, эмоций, чувств, обязанностей, привилегий одного кусочка реальности. Проматываешь дальше и картина вокруг полностью меняется. Малый объем отдельного фрагмента Эрно умеет максимально плотно наполнить значимым содержанием, соединяя историю прогресса, политику, культуру с этапами жизни женщины.
Книга выстроена в тесной привязке к визуальному ряду, каждый этап предваряет описание фотографии из семейного архива: маленькая девочка, подросток, девушка, юная женщина, молодая жена и мать, мама сыновей подростков, профессионал на грани развода, свободная женщина в новом мучительном романе, синдром опустевшего гнезда, бабушка и опять деструктивные отношения с мужчиной, разрыв и новые отношения, на сей раз конструктивные. Об этом фоном. это не заслоняет собой мира и того, что в нем происходит.
Собственно история в ее предметном наполнении и есть содержание. Вторая половина XX и первое десятилетие XXI века, промежуток времени от примерно 1946 года. когда Анни начинает осознавать себя более-менее внятно, до 2008, в котором книга вышла в свет. Обычная жизнь девочки из нижнего слоя среднего класса, у родителей была своя небольшая торговля в маленьком городке. Вот так одевались, это ели в повседневной жизни, то на праздник, такие разговоры велись в застольях, такие песни пели, такие присказки были, этим восхищались, то презирали и осуждали, так обращались с детьми, так лечились.
Время сдвигается, на следующем фото уже не милая пухлая детка, а девочка. которая хочет быть похожей на кинозвезду и безотчетно копирует позу с обложки журнала. Так общались в школе, четкое разделение класса на три не пересекающихся подмножества: богачки, изгои, середняки. Интересно. что об аспекте классово-кланового разделения с самого раннего этапа взросления практически никто не говорит как Эрно. У большинства тех, кто пишет о школе класс нечто монолитное. У нее четко: были девочки, которые вне школы не взглянули бы на тебя, были такие, которых ты сама не сочла бы достойными разговора. И внезапным узнаванием окатывает: на самом деле так, в любой группе из трех десятков человек общаешься максимум с десятью.
Время идет, девочка взрослеет, вот групповое фото старших школьниц, по спокойной сдержанности героини нипочем не догадаешься, что больше всего на свете ее беспокоит задержка месячных. Дальше: Париж, студентка, роман с будущим мужем, технический прогресс все настойчивее вторгается в повседневность, пылесос, холодильник с морозильной камерой, мечты о малолитражке. Первенец, ежедневные заботы о семье, и вот уже родители с их советами о ребенке и приемах экономии не кажутся такими безнадежно отсталыми.
Политические события, не затрагивая напрямую, не воспринимаются по-настоящему значимыми. Вот война за независимость в Алжире, поди-разбери что там реально происходит. Надо бы скорее подавить бандитов, которые все затеяли. Внезапно Алжир уже не наш, и "черноногие" (французские колонисты) возвращаются, а с ними и за ними волна мигрантов-арабов, лояльных прежнему правительству, которым при новой власти грозит смерть. Странно, но они похоже готовы делать самую непрестижную низкооплачиваемую работу - пусть будут.
А потом май 68-го, героине в это время уже к тридцати,семья, работа, двое детей, мечта об отпуске в Испании (там все дешевле). Что? Какие студенческие волнения? После, когда волна докатывается до их провинции, охватывает всю страну - да, мы тоже не выйдем на работу. И вот этот момент: после будут вспоминать май 68 так, словно сами были на баррикадах, временная дистанция искажает восприятия, но на самом деле было вот так.
Так со всем: слушали, читали то и то, ездили отдыхать туда, покупали в семью это. Вот таким прорывом оказался телевизор, давший зрелища всем членам семьи и вернувший мужчин в дом. А так воспринимали политиков: де Голль, Помпиду, Ширак, Жоскар дЭстен, Митерран, Саркози. Индокитай, Мао, Карибский кризис (красавец Кеннеди-мужлан Хрущев), войну во Вьетнаме, Чили, Перестройку, площадь Тяньаньмэнь, Чернобыль, 11 сентября, компьютер, мобильный телефон, интернет.
До предела насыщенный, видимый, слышимый, осязаемый предметный мир, в котором рассказчица занимает не меньше, и не больше места, чем все остальное. Равнозначность человека и истории, органичная встроенность женщины в реальность, которая может казаться равнодушной и враждебной, но их принадлежность друг другу несомненна.
"Years" will take about as much time and are written in such a way that reading is really like watching a social network feed: you squander, immerse yourself in the text as in a video, finding yourself among things, objects, names, ideas, prejudices, emotions, feelings, duties, privileges of one piece of reality. You scroll further and the picture around completely changes. Erno is able to fill a small volume of a separate fragment with meaningful content as tightly as possible, connecting the history of progress, politics, culture with the stages of a woman's life.
A world in which the narrator occupies no less and no more space than everything else. The equivalence of man and history.
Женщина и утраченное время
Вся наша взрослая жизнь прошла при власти, которая не имела к нам никакого отношения, и двадцать три года казались единой безнадежной текучей массой, откуда не вышло ничего удачного в смысле политики. Мы ощущали такую досаду, словно у нас украли часть юности.
Анни Эрно, литературный Нобель нынешнего года и тот случай, когда к академикам испытываешь благодарность: если бы не их выбор, не узнала бы этой писательницы и этой книги. Одна из особенностей Эрно-писателя малый объем произведений, она не из тех, кто пакует сокровища своей мудрости в тысячестраничные кирпичи. В современности все больше тяготеюще к скроллингу и клиповости, у книги, на которую потратишь вечер, больше шансов быть прочитанной, чем у толстого романа.
"Годы" возьмут примерно столько по времени и написаны так, что чтение, вправду, похоже на просмотр ленты соцсети: проматываешь, погружаешься в текст как в ролик, оказываясь среди вещей, предметов, имен, идей, предрассудков, эмоций, чувств, обязанностей, привилегий одного кусочка реальности. Проматываешь дальше и картина вокруг полностью меняется. Малый объем отдельного фрагмента Эрно умеет максимально плотно наполнить значимым содержанием, соединяя историю прогресса, политику, культуру с этапами жизни женщины.
Книга выстроена в тесной привязке к визуальному ряду, каждый этап предваряет описание фотографии из семейного архива: маленькая девочка, подросток, девушка, юная женщина, молодая жена и мать, мама сыновей подростков, профессионал на грани развода, свободная женщина в новом мучительном романе, синдром опустевшего гнезда, бабушка и опять деструктивные отношения с мужчиной, разрыв и новые отношения, на сей раз конструктивные. Об этом фоном. это не заслоняет собой мира и того, что в нем происходит.
Собственно история в ее предметном наполнении и есть содержание. Вторая половина XX и первое десятилетие XXI века, промежуток времени от примерно 1946 года. когда Анни начинает осознавать себя более-менее внятно, до 2008, в котором книга вышла в свет. Обычная жизнь девочки из нижнего слоя среднего класса, у родителей была своя небольшая торговля в маленьком городке. Вот так одевались, это ели в повседневной жизни, то на праздник, такие разговоры велись в застольях, такие песни пели, такие присказки были, этим восхищались, то презирали и осуждали, так обращались с детьми, так лечились.
Время сдвигается, на следующем фото уже не милая пухлая детка, а девочка. которая хочет быть похожей на кинозвезду и безотчетно копирует позу с обложки журнала. Так общались в школе, четкое разделение класса на три не пересекающихся подмножества: богачки, изгои, середняки. Интересно. что об аспекте классово-кланового разделения с самого раннего этапа взросления практически никто не говорит как Эрно. У большинства тех, кто пишет о школе класс нечто монолитное. У нее четко: были девочки, которые вне школы не взглянули бы на тебя, были такие, которых ты сама не сочла бы достойными разговора. И внезапным узнаванием окатывает: на самом деле так, в любой группе из трех десятков человек общаешься максимум с десятью.
Время идет, девочка взрослеет, вот групповое фото старших школьниц, по спокойной сдержанности героини нипочем не догадаешься, что больше всего на свете ее беспокоит задержка месячных. Дальше: Париж, студентка, роман с будущим мужем, технический прогресс все настойчивее вторгается в повседневность, пылесос, холодильник с морозильной камерой, мечты о малолитражке. Первенец, ежедневные заботы о семье, и вот уже родители с их советами о ребенке и приемах экономии не кажутся такими безнадежно отсталыми.
Политические события, не затрагивая напрямую, не воспринимаются по-настоящему значимыми. Вот война за независимость в Алжире, поди-разбери что там реально происходит. Надо бы скорее подавить бандитов, которые все затеяли. Внезапно Алжир уже не наш, и "черноногие" (французские колонисты) возвращаются, а с ними и за ними волна мигрантов-арабов, лояльных прежнему правительству, которым при новой власти грозит смерть. Странно, но они похоже готовы делать самую непрестижную низкооплачиваемую работу - пусть будут.
А потом май 68-го, героине в это время уже к тридцати,семья, работа, двое детей, мечта об отпуске в Испании (там все дешевле). Что? Какие студенческие волнения? После, когда волна докатывается до их провинции, охватывает всю страну - да, мы тоже не выйдем на работу. И вот этот момент: после будут вспоминать май 68 так, словно сами были на баррикадах, временная дистанция искажает восприятия, но на самом деле было вот так.
Так со всем: слушали, читали то и то, ездили отдыхать туда, покупали в семью это. Вот таким прорывом оказался телевизор, давший зрелища всем членам семьи и вернувший мужчин в дом. А так воспринимали политиков: де Голль, Помпиду, Ширак, Жоскар дЭстен, Митерран, Саркози. Индокитай, Мао, Карибский кризис (красавец Кеннеди-мужлан Хрущев), войну во Вьетнаме, Чили, Перестройку, площадь Тяньаньмэнь, Чернобыль, 11 сентября, компьютер, мобильный телефон, интернет.
До предела насыщенный, видимый, слышимый, осязаемый предметный мир, в котором рассказчица занимает не меньше, и не больше места, чем все остальное. Равнозначность человека и истории, органичная встроенность женщины в реальность, которая может казаться равнодушной и враждебной, но их принадлежность друг другу несомненна.
October 6, 2022
I enjoy historical non-fiction so I did find plenty of interest in this part personal memoir/ part collective- autobiographical reflection on French society and history from 1941-2006, which I came to via its Man Booker Prize International longlisting – the jury there deciding that if the main prize jury can count comics as novels, then they can count non-fiction as fiction.
Interestingly one of the recurrent themes of the author’s reflections are on her lifelong ambition to write a novel – for example
Had she but of known the MBI jury were not fussed at the fiction/non-fiction distinction, I feel the author could have been spared years of agony.
This is clearly a book which is aimed at French readers, for whom the extensive cultural observations will make more or less sense depending on their age and interests – for an English reader much of it is obscure and, particularly where there were paragraphs of lists, I simply found myself skipping through large chunks with only at best cursory interest.
And this is not helped by the very odd footnotes. The translator has chosen to provide 29 brief footnotes (when either nil or 100+ or indeed a full appendix would have made more sense) – and I was puzzled by the choices made.
For example why in the sentence: “The table buzzed with peacefully disparate and mocking remarks, about the barbouzes, Mauriac and his stifled cluck of a laugh, the tics of Malraux” is only “barbouzes” footnoted – I can Google that just (if not more) easily than the two names.
This seems to reach a nadir with the decision, among copious untranslated French to footnote the French part of: “Kids requested fruit-flavoured Evain Water (‘l’Evian fruit, c’est plus muscle’)” with the translation as “Fruit flavoured Evain water makes you stronger”, whereas “Comme un arbre dans la Ville” on the same page is completely unfootnoted despite the first having both rather heavy explanatory context and words which are fairly easy to translate even for someone with zero French. In fact I cannot conceive of a reader who could translate the second but not the first.
Only to be exceeded when I was similarly baffled at one of the very limited English translator footnotes being given over to a translation from Spanish (“Giants and Cabzeudos”) which would presumably be just as required by a French reader?
Now I have to be honest the above criticisms are potentially unfair:
There is lots to like in this innovative piece of autofiction, particularly: the way the personal is turned into a collective, the clever way that pictures are used to capture and then anchor the passing of time and the mirroring of physical changes in inner and societal changes; the way political events form a backdrop and media/consumer changes form more of the foreground – reflecting the reality of most people’s actual experiences – so a form of socio-economic rather than political/economic history.
Many of the cultural references were either very interesting to me (for example the constant references to both World Wars from earlier generations, the view of 1968 as a lost opportunity or betrayal), personally familiar (Tour de France references), generally familiar to most English readers (much of French politics) or clear enough that I could grasp the social essence that was being described (and quickly draw an English analogy).
The footnotes while not perfect are useful while not being intrusive.
But the book completely forfeited my good will and sympathy with a shameful joke on the first page – whose inclusion I find entirely unjustifiable and which has cost the book its rating.
Interestingly one of the recurrent themes of the author’s reflections are on her lifelong ambition to write a novel – for example
“the idea has come to her to write a “kind of woman’s destiny”, set between 1940 and 1985. It would be something like Maupassant’s “A Life” and convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself, in History, a “total novel” that would end with her dispossession of people and things”
Had she but of known the MBI jury were not fussed at the fiction/non-fiction distinction, I feel the author could have been spared years of agony.
This is clearly a book which is aimed at French readers, for whom the extensive cultural observations will make more or less sense depending on their age and interests – for an English reader much of it is obscure and, particularly where there were paragraphs of lists, I simply found myself skipping through large chunks with only at best cursory interest.
And this is not helped by the very odd footnotes. The translator has chosen to provide 29 brief footnotes (when either nil or 100+ or indeed a full appendix would have made more sense) – and I was puzzled by the choices made.
For example why in the sentence: “The table buzzed with peacefully disparate and mocking remarks, about the barbouzes, Mauriac and his stifled cluck of a laugh, the tics of Malraux” is only “barbouzes” footnoted – I can Google that just (if not more) easily than the two names.
This seems to reach a nadir with the decision, among copious untranslated French to footnote the French part of: “Kids requested fruit-flavoured Evain Water (‘l’Evian fruit, c’est plus muscle’)” with the translation as “Fruit flavoured Evain water makes you stronger”, whereas “Comme un arbre dans la Ville” on the same page is completely unfootnoted despite the first having both rather heavy explanatory context and words which are fairly easy to translate even for someone with zero French. In fact I cannot conceive of a reader who could translate the second but not the first.
Only to be exceeded when I was similarly baffled at one of the very limited English translator footnotes being given over to a translation from Spanish (“Giants and Cabzeudos”) which would presumably be just as required by a French reader?
Now I have to be honest the above criticisms are potentially unfair:
There is lots to like in this innovative piece of autofiction, particularly: the way the personal is turned into a collective, the clever way that pictures are used to capture and then anchor the passing of time and the mirroring of physical changes in inner and societal changes; the way political events form a backdrop and media/consumer changes form more of the foreground – reflecting the reality of most people’s actual experiences – so a form of socio-economic rather than political/economic history.
Many of the cultural references were either very interesting to me (for example the constant references to both World Wars from earlier generations, the view of 1968 as a lost opportunity or betrayal), personally familiar (Tour de France references), generally familiar to most English readers (much of French politics) or clear enough that I could grasp the social essence that was being described (and quickly draw an English analogy).
The footnotes while not perfect are useful while not being intrusive.
But the book completely forfeited my good will and sympathy with a shameful joke on the first page – whose inclusion I find entirely unjustifiable and which has cost the book its rating.
February 1, 2022
All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset
Viena iš geriausių mano skaitytų (auto)biografijų. Prancūzų rašytoja, Annie Ernaux, labai originaliai guldo čia savo prisiminimus apie save, savo kartą ir Prancūziją nuo 1941-ųjų iki 2006-ųjų metų. Šioje autobiografijoje visiškai nesijaučia autorės asmeniškumo. Greičiausiai todėl, kad ji nenaudoja įvardžio AŠ. Vietoj jo autorė rašo Ji. Pasakodama apie savo kartą - JIE/MES...
Pats pasakojimas - chronologiškai nuoseklus, tačiau jo nuobodumą gelbsti fragmentiškumas ir labai jau žavūs atsitiktinių vaizdų, garsų, matytų filmų, girdėtų dainų nuotrupos (nors dažnai, man - ne frankomanei, ne ką sakančios), nuotraukų, kurių pačių knygoje nėra, aprašymai...
Visos tos smulkmenos, musiau, ir sukūrė tą, unikalią nuotaiką ir išskirtinį stilių...
Prancūzijoje ši knyga išleista 2008-iais, 2019 -iais m. pateko į Man Booker International trumpąjį sąrašą. Būtų puiku matyti ją išleistą lietuviškai, greičiausiai skaityčiau ją dar sykį.
........
We joked, ''God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don't feel so good either''. We had a sense of play.
There is no ''I" in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ''one'' and ''we'', as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time - before.
-Jose Ortega y Gasset
Viena iš geriausių mano skaitytų (auto)biografijų. Prancūzų rašytoja, Annie Ernaux, labai originaliai guldo čia savo prisiminimus apie save, savo kartą ir Prancūziją nuo 1941-ųjų iki 2006-ųjų metų. Šioje autobiografijoje visiškai nesijaučia autorės asmeniškumo. Greičiausiai todėl, kad ji nenaudoja įvardžio AŠ. Vietoj jo autorė rašo Ji. Pasakodama apie savo kartą - JIE/MES...
Pats pasakojimas - chronologiškai nuoseklus, tačiau jo nuobodumą gelbsti fragmentiškumas ir labai jau žavūs atsitiktinių vaizdų, garsų, matytų filmų, girdėtų dainų nuotrupos (nors dažnai, man - ne frankomanei, ne ką sakančios), nuotraukų, kurių pačių knygoje nėra, aprašymai...
Visos tos smulkmenos, musiau, ir sukūrė tą, unikalią nuotaiką ir išskirtinį stilių...
Prancūzijoje ši knyga išleista 2008-iais, 2019 -iais m. pateko į Man Booker International trumpąjį sąrašą. Būtų puiku matyti ją išleistą lietuviškai, greičiausiai skaityčiau ją dar sykį.
........
We joked, ''God is dead, Marx is dead, and I don't feel so good either''. We had a sense of play.
There is no ''I" in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ''one'' and ''we'', as if now it were her turn to tell the story of the time - before.
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