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Adam Dalva's Reviews > The Years
The Years
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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."
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February 6, 2020
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February 6, 2020
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Jennifer
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Nov 21, 2020 09:52AM
Fantastic review, Adam! Never read Ernaux, will start here...
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Beautiful review, Adam. I want to read this soon.
I agree this book is “uniquely effective” as you say.Her style is detached with her unexpected use of the third person voice. I was surprised how well that worked in a memoir.
Love your review! I very much appreciated the Translator's Note; I have ordered the original French book.
Thanks for mentioning the pacing of the book. I was a bit frustrated with the rapid pace in the latter part of the book, but it makes sense in the context of what you've said.
Great review Adam, and good to see you also picked up on that quote. I found it utterly fascinating to see how the idea of the book develops in the book itself (kind of like a recurring “mise en abyme”) and this seemed to me to be the first time it popped up (more than twenty years before she found the form she needed to actually write and publish it).
