The Years

Annie Ernaux

A memoir with almost no "I" in it — a single life told as the weather of a whole generation. How she holds that collective voice steady for two hundred pages is, to me, still an open question.

Ernaux writes in the third person and the impersonal, moving through decades of photographs, advertisements, songs and half-remembered arguments. The self is present, but only as one more thing the period happened to.

The chapters covering the 1980s are the ones that lodge. Not because the decade is treated as important, but because it is treated as ordinary — which is far harder to do and much rarer to read.

It is a short book that takes a long time. Some of that is the prose. Most of it is the recognition.

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