#ReadIndies is running all month hosted by Kaggsy and Lizzy and it has meant I’ve finally got to a book that I’ve been meaning to read for ages: The Years by Annie Ernaux (2008, transl. Alison L. Strayer 2018) published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.

A further incentive was that I really want to see the theatre adaptation which is currently running, and now I’ve read the book I have bought my ticket 😊

The Years is a book which deliberately avoids categorisation. Told in chronological order from 1941 to 2006 but in a fragmentary style, it is a memoir/autobiography/autofiction where Ernaux never uses the first person. She refers to ‘she’ for the more personal memories triggered by photographic images, and ‘we’ for considerations of the society and cultural influences experienced by ‘she’ at the time.

Growing up, she is aware of the poverty of her family, and dreams of escape. Ernaux captures so well the confusion of trying to find an authentic escape, trying to determine what she truly wants, alongside what advertising tells her she wants:

“Meanwhile, as we waited to be old enough to wear Rouge Baiser lipstick and perfume by Bourjois with a j as in joy, we collected plastic animals hidden in bags of coffee, and from Menier chocolate wrappers, Fables of La Fontaine stamps that we swapped with friends at break time.”

“It seems to her that education is more than just a way to escape poverty. It is a weapon of choice against stagnation in a kind of feminine condition that arouses her pity, the tendency to lose oneself in a man.”

There are strong feminist themes running throughout The Years, as she grows up on the brink of societal change. At the start:

“Nothing, not intelligence, education, or beauty mattered as much as a girl’s sexual reputation, that is, her value on the marriage market, which mothers scrupulously monitored as their mothers had done before them.”

Yet the 1960s are on their way… Ernaux pulls no punches in detailing the tyranny of menstrual cycles, and of “kitchen table abortions” before the contraceptive pill arrives and pregnancy terminations are legalised.

“Between the freedom of Bardot, the taunting of boys who claimed that virginity was bad for the health, and the dictates of Church and parents, we were left with no choices at all.”

The Years is lightened by humour too, such as this wry observation regarding her young feminist:

“Two future goals coexist inside her: (1) to be thin and blonde, (2) to be free, autonomous, and useful to the world. She dreams of herself as Mylène Demongeot and Simone de Beauvoir.”

The Years is a powerful evocation of a woman’s life at a specific time. Ernaux demonstrates so clearly how lives are bound up with the culture and the wider political forces in which they take place. It is impossible to consider the life in The Years without considering France in the same period. Yet this is an observation which occurs as she looks back, not at the time:

“Between what happens in the world and what happens to her, there is no point of convergence. They are two parallel series: one abstract, all information no sooner received them forgotten, the other all static shots.”

But as she grows older:

“What is most changed in her is the perception of time and her own location within it.”

And yet,plus ca change plus c’est la même chose, as Ernaux notes consumerism and its false promises endure:

“More than a sense of possession it was this feeling people sought on the shelves of Zara and H&M, instantly granted upon acquiring things, a supplement of being.”

The fragmentary style in The Years is perfect example of an experimental style being grounded by the story it wishes to tell, rather than being employed just for the sake of being different or to demonstrate the author’s cleverness. It conveys the experience of memory as well as the memories themselves. As a reader you are drawn into the layering of images, feelings and experiences in such a direct and immersive way, with all the intimacy of a first-person narrative despite the fact that Ernaux never articulates ‘I’.

“Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and death bed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.”