Roman Clodia's Reviews > The Years

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!