The Years

‘All the images will disappear.’ ‘To save something from the time where we will never be again.’

These are the first and last sentences of Annie Ernaux’s The Years (Les Années), first published in French in 2008, and in English in 2017 with a fine translation by Alison L. Strayer (in the wonderful Fitzcarraldo Editions). Given its brilliance, it seems odd it took so many, well, years to appear here.

The distinguishing mark of this capacious memoir is its shying away from ‘I’ to an encompassing (in translation)‘we’: when Ernaud wishes to be more directly personal she slides sideways into ‘she’. It follows the life and times of the narrator from birth to her late 60s, along the way drawing in decades of French culture, politics and consumer habits. The stepping stones are photographs which are described dispassionately, as if the narrator is not their subject. The reflections on these photographs are at once intimate and puzzled; the photographs themselves do not appear.

‘Family narrative and social narrative are one and the same’ (p.29). This is a great narrative about family, first as a child and moving through the teenage years to marriage, motherhood and eventually being a grandmother. Over the years, the family meal remains central, whatever the disruptions of public life, a rare island of stability in the river of change. ‘Things’ constantly change, are lost, become objects of nostalgia (this is a great book on the texture of everyday life): Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘One Art’ comes to mind.

I found the concluding pages particularly moving, after Ernaux has retired from her teaching job and looks back at the years which have brought her to this point:

The future is replaced by a sense of urgency that torments her. She is afraid that as she ages her memory will become cloudy and silent, as it was in her first years of life, which she won’t remember anymore. Already when she tries to recall her colleagues from the lycée in the mountains where she taught for two years, she sees silhouettes and faces, some with extreme precision, but she cannot possibly “put a name to them”. She tries desperately to retrieve the missing name, match the name with the person, join the separate halves. Maybe one day all things and their names will slip out of alignment and she’ll no longer be able to put words to reality. All that will remain is the reality that cannot be spoken. Now’s the time to give form to her future absence through writing, start the book, still a draft of thousands of notes, which has lived in parallel to her existence for the past twenty years and is thus obliged to cover a longer and longer time. (222-3).

Thirteen years have passed since the book was first published: it would be fascinating to read an ‘update’ now, as further layers of life have laid themselves down to create ‘palimpsest time’.