Jim Fonseca's Reviews > The Years

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]