For France, I read The Years by Annie Ernaux, translated from the French by Alison L. Strayer.
There are a lot of gaps in my experience with French literature. I’ve read Proust, but not Victor Hugo; tons of Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas, but nothing by Jean-Paul Satre or Simone de Beauvoir, and the list of authors I have NOT read goes on and on, so embarrassingly long. Not for the first time, I lamented the fact that my high school literature classes were called “English” and we never ventured beyond American and British authors. I felt a little panic when I was choosing my book for France–so many options! how could I choose one?!–but then I remembered this does not have to be the last French book I will ever read. I am not in school and can read whatever I damn please and if that means crossing all the neglected French authors off my TBR list, than so be it! (But we should probably not tell Brazil that.)
When I learned that a female French author won the Nobel Prize in 2022, I knew I had to at least consider her books for this project. When I did a little digging and learned Ernaux’s work is known for blending autobiography with sociology, I knew I had found my author. My mom really wanted me to read Madame Bovary but my intuition was screaming for Ernaux, and when it comes to this quest, I never apologize for my intuition. Even when that means reading a biography about Eva Perón for Argentina instead of Borges or rejecting my mom’s suggestion for France.
We now interrupt this blog post for a brief tangent! As I continue my Read Around the World quest, I am becoming more and more convinced that I will someday turn this experience into a book, but this is just a foggy notion. The book’s anatomy has not yet emerged. Will it be memoir? Or something less personal that examines world literature? Or will I blend the two together? With those questions quietly humming in my mind’s background, I was naturally drawn to Ernaux. Okay, now back to our regular programming.
For my quest, I picked The Years, a personal narrative of the years 1941 to 2006 that feels like a collective memoir of France while also being a very intimate examination of Ernaux’s life. This is not your conventional memoir. It is told from different points of view, shifting between the first person plural “we,” which makes it feels like Ernaux was elected as spokeswoman for an entire generation of France, and the third person “she” which cultivates a sort of emotional detachment, like you would find in an academic paper. I loved both perspectives.
Like Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time (Belarus) and Aida Edemariam’s The Wife’s Tale (Ethiopia), this book presented a much more feminine version of history than was taught by my college professors twenty-five years ago. It’s the sort of history that speaks to my soul, shifting easily between international events and the domestic sphere. After all, history is so much more than who was in charge and what weapons were used during a particular battle.
We see through Ernaux’s astute observations how the experiences of her generation shifted over time. Sometimes, Ernaux examines old photographs of herself and describes her changing outfits, hair styles, and demeanor, so we see how she grows from small child to grandma. These descriptions were extra poignant for me because I read this book only a couple weeks after my parents’ house was completely destroyed by the Eaton Fire, turning most of my childhood photos to ash.
Other times, Ernaux describes the dinner conversations at family gatherings, and we see how the subjects change. When Ernaux is a small child, World War II was the focus of these gatherings, but as the decades passed and memories faded, talk shifted to new matters. While reading The Years, I found myself often ruminating on time, memory, and change and applauding the way Ernaux crafted such an original style.
By the time I reached the twentieth page of The Years, I knew I will have to read everything Ernaux has written. My intuition demands it and when it comes to reading, my intuition knows her stuff.