Annie Ernaux

Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present--even projections into the future--photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns."

The Years

only like 5 pages in and i'm losing my mcfuckin mind..... jesus....

Patricia K

images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. and one day we'll appear in our children's memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. like sexual desire, memory never stops. it pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.

Sarah Christine Gill

Apart from the ballerina flats, nothing in the appearance of this teenage girl reflects what was all the rage that year or what was in the fashion magazines and the big-city shops, long plaid midi skirts, black jumpers, and chunky lockets, ponytails and a fringe like Audrey Hepburn's in Roman Holiday. The photo could easily date from the late forties or early sixties. For those born later it is simply old, and belongs to the prehistory of self, where all lives that precede one's own are levelled and disappear. Yet the beam that lights one side of the girl's face and the jumper, between the breasts, was for her a sensation of heat from the June sun of a year that no historian, or anyone else who lived at the time, could could mistake for any other than 1955. 

We had time to desire things, plastic pencil cases, Crepe-soled shoes, gold watches. Their possession did not disappoint. We held them up to the admiration of others. They contained a mystery and magic that sur- vived their contemplation and handling. Turning them this way and that, we continued to expect something unfathomable.

Below the photo, written by hand: Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc - Rouen - Pbilosopby section, Class of 1958--1959. The names have not been inscribed, as though when the class president delivered the photos it had been unthinkable that any could be forgotten. Certainly, none of the girls could have imagined herself forty years later, an elderly woman looking at faces once so familiar and seeing only a triple row of ghosts with bright fixed gazes. 

Over weeks and repetitions of the daily circuits, and Visits to the car parks, the sense of strangeness would fade. We would be amazed to find ourselves a part of this huge and nebulous population whose dim roar, rising from the motorways morning and night, seemed to imbue us with an invisible and powerful reality. We would discover Paris, locate its streets, arrondissements, and Métro stations, determine the best place on the platform to disembark and transfer to another train. At last we would dare to drive to the Place de l'Etoile and Concorde. At the entrance to the Gennevilliers bridge, where the immense vista ofParis suddenly opened up in front ofus, we would have the exalted sense of belonging to this huge and hectic life. It was a kind of individual promotion. We would no longer wish to return to what had become for us the undifferentiated 'provinces. And one evening, as our train plunged into a night studded with the bright red and blue neon signs of the Paris region, the Upper Savoie city we'd left three years before would seem like the ends of the earth.

The last summer - everything was the 'last' - arrived. People gathered once more. They sped away to the clifs above the Channel, or flocked to public gardens in Paris to see the moon blot out the sun at noon. A chill descended, a kind of dusk. We were anxious for the sun's return but also yearned to linger in that peculiar darkness, the sensation of iving through the extinction of humanity in fast-forward. Millions of cosmic years passed before our eyes, shrouded in dark glasses. Blind faces raised to the sky seemed to await the coming ofa god or the pale rider of the Apocalypse. The sun reappeared and people clapped. There wouldn't be another solar eclipse until 2081, and we would be long gone. 

Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.

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