Annie Ernaux The Years/Les Années

 

It took me more than a lifetime to finally find an author encompassing in such a perfectly fit way the meeting between the individual and history. Not in a dramatic form, not as the curse of history, not as a heroic encounter. Just your everyday individual immersed into the waves of time. 

Annie Ernaux, in her personal chronicle of The Years/Les Années epitomizes everything I was ever looking for, and even a bit more. The time is melting into words, is reconfigurated into personal encounters and is displayed as a documentary movie of one personal life experience. Covering the long timeline between 1940 - her date of birth - until 2006 - it is more than an ´objective´ - whatever this enormous empty word may mean - historical account of how fast everything changed and how tremendous those changes are. Instead, it is a very personal look at the time, by one woman who went through all this. 

Both as a historian and political scientist, but equally a literature lover, I often ask myself about how one can reify the historical time into a personal story. More or less, we - humans with no historical trace - are affected by the big historical trends. Our perception and our lives are shaped by those decisions. We are rarely aware of - as most of us do not have the luxury of time to think about it, but just living everything by default, caught in the merry-go-round of our daily simple lives. But, for instance, the situation of the health system affects our life - including by shortening it or saving us; the society and legal views on abortion and contraception do affect our personal sexual choices; countries at war do shape our experience of trauma and define our individual personalities.

The perfect pace that creates a poetic life collage, a palimpsest of fact and life fragments, it is all there, in Ernaux´s book. From the desire to be happy inspired by The Beatles to the end of the Cold War and even the death of Fernand Braudel. I cannot describe my happiness reading the book and then listening the audiobook format of this book. It made my thoughts much clearer and my literary ideas even more doable. French language come to my rescue, again...

Born in a family with a working-class background, she has a degree in modern literature and taught for a while in high school. One of the founder of Seven Stories Press her books - that I want to read them all, at least once - do have a personal/memoir touch. Writing about one self in the world is a radical writing act.

I will need more and more time to chew all the literary inspiration of this one and only book. After a very long pause, I finally discovered a new author to inspire me in the most highly existential way.

Rating: 5 stars