Fionnuala's Reviews > Les Années

There'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.