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    The Years
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    The Years
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    The Years
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Years

    Written by Annie Ernaux

    Narrated by Anna Bentinck

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The Years is a personal narrative of the period of 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 and headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and written notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the time, slogans, brands, and names for ever-proliferating objects are given a 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateSep 10, 2019
    ISBN9781974974733
    Unavailable
    The Years
    Author

    Annie Ernaux

    Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance. Her books, in particular A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, have become contemporary classics in France. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  

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    Reviews for The Years

    4/5

    141 ratings5 reviews

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    • 5/5
      The best account I read in personal and historical sense about the changing times after 1940, the year she was born. The feeling is, that it is also your own life is described, you recognize it even Ernaux is of another generation and French. Just one small example the freedom it brought that all women could drive their own car. The way she is describing how she is driving her car in anonimity. Utter freemdom!
    • 4/5
      Though I did not love this book, I can see how someone would (especially the French, as there is A LOT of French political history in here).This books is a "generational" memoir, for lack of a better term. Ernaux has written a memoir that is told through her eyes, experiencing life as a member of a generation. The entire generation experienced the same school types, media, events, politicians, changing laws, changing sexual morés, etc. It begins with the description of a baby in a photo c1941 (herself) and continues into the 21st century. It is fully linear, discussing daily life, dreams, politics, family, work (she was a teacher), relationships, immigration, and so on. Early on she examines the world her grandparents discuss at the table, the world her generation never knew, of dirt floors in houses and washing clothes in wood-ash (p25), and of the provincialness of different areas of France: their habits, food (p33), voices, "a mangled French mixed with local dialects" (p27), the following the Catholic calendar and sexual morés, and living in the scarcity of everything (p34). And how, for her generation, the school calendar replaced that of the season (p29). My favorite bits revolved around the consumerism. First it was exciting, as "the days of restrictions were at an end" (p37). "We had time to desire things, plastic pencil cases, crepe-soled shoes, gold watches" (p39)--while they lived without indoor plumbing, enitre families sleeping in one room, with mustard poultices a common medicine.p 110: "And we who were undeceived, who seriously examined the dangers of advertising with our students; we who assigned the topic "Does the possession of material goods lead to happiness?" nought a stereo, a Grundig radio-cassette player, and a Bell & Howell Super 8 camera, with a sense of using modernity to intelligent ends. For us and by us, consumption was purified." This continues, right up to computers and cell phones. She is as nervous about a cellphone as her parents' generation was about computers. Which brings up aging, and how it sneaks up on you. "For a moment we were struck by the strangeness of repeating a ritual in which we now occupied the middle position between two generations" (p129) "She pictures herself in ten or fifteen years...for grandchildren not yet born. BUt she sees that woman as improbable, just as the girl of 25 saw the woman of forty, who she has become and already ceased to be" (p169).There are two quotes at the very beginning of the book--facing the copyright page. On by José Ortega, the other by Chekhov. Part of the Chekhov quote: "And it may be that our present life, which we accept so readily, will in time seem strange, inconvenient, stupid, not clean enough, perhaps even sinful...". That is pretty much what this book is about.
    • 4/5
      Annie Ernaux's book belongs in that odd genre of auto-fiction, books that are based on the author's own life, but the events of the past have either been altered or the author concedes that their own memories are not necessarily accurate. Here, Ernaux takes her own life and memories as a way of telling the story of what life was like during her life, for herself, for women in France, and for France itself.Beginning in the mid-1940s, the book begins with Ernaux's earliest memories, and with descriptions of family photos of herself. As her story moves forward, it becomes a universal story of a time and place, of what family dinners looked like, what school was like and how things changed over time, with lifestyles adapting to the availability of consumer goods, as the older folks died and so the Sunday dinner conversations moved on from the war to other subjects, like the events in Algeria or student uprisings.This is a superbly constructed and immensely readable book. I did stop many times to look up names and events, but that was due to my lack of knowledge of French history and popular culture. It was so interesting to look at a time slightly different from my own (Ernaux belongs to my parents' generation) and at a country other than my own. Ernaux mixes the personal with the universal as she writes her way through the years of her life and the result is something greater than either a straight memoir or social history would have been.
    • 4/5
      Sauver quelque chose du temps où l'on ne sera plus jamaisLes Années is a very interesting attempt to mix the forms of memoir and social history to create a kind of depersonalised autobiography which is at the same time a history of living in France from the 1940s to the early 21st century - from de Gaulle to Sarko. She writes about herself in the third person ("elle", not "je") and avoids the perfect tense as far as possible to insist on the generality of the experiences she is describing. She isn't trying to rewrite Proust: "La recherche du temps perdu passait par le web", she notes ironically when discussing the first years of the new century. But the book does take concrete artefacts, in particular photographs of herself, as stimulants of memory. The viewpoint is detached, none of the characters in the story is named, but she doesn't try to step entirely outside her own experience: she is explicitly writing as a woman born in the 1940s, coming from a provincial, working-class background, and spending her working life in an intellectual, left-leaning environment. The text is full of references to products, films, books, songs, political and cultural events, causes, technological change, and all the other markers that we use to place ourselves in history, but it becomes vague and allusive when it is talking about personal life. Births and deaths happen offstage, love affairs are commented on mostly in retrospect (Ernaux has written in detail about all these things elsewhere, of course). Obviously you miss some of the fine detail of this if you haven't actually lived in France during the decades she is describing (I've probably seen about 1/10 of the films she mentions and heard of about half of the politicians and musicians...), but that isn't really important: it's a book that makes you think about history and memory and the way the two work together in literature, and that's always an interesting and worthwhile exercise. And it manages to look at nearly seventy years of social and political change without becoming morose and pessimistic. The tone is always pleasantly ironic, never overcome by events, but never so detached that it refuses to take a moral stand. Very nicely done!
    • 4/5
      A briliiant overview in the form of a the author's own experiences in the changing world between 1941 and 2001. Inevitably the immediate context is France but it is universal in its scope and meaning.I am not sure whether I felt optimistic or pessimistic having read it. The only bit I took issue with was the author's constant need to remind us all about her great sex life at whatever age she was or is, wife or cougar.