Annie Ernaux, ‘The Years’ (2008; translated by Alison L. Strayer 2017)
Following Ernaux’s Nobel win I addressed my (deplorable, no question) ignorance of her work by reading this. It’s acclaimed, the blurb tells me, as her masterpiece: won the Prix Renadot in France and the Premio Strega in Italy.
It’s … fine? I guess? A deliberately bitty panorama of life in France from the 1940s to c.2000 made up of lots of short paragraphs, flashbulb moments from history and culture, news, lists of films seen and various moments from the protagonist’s life: schooldays, life as a wife and mother in provincial France, working as a teacher, life post-divorce with a handsome young toyboy. Perfectly readable but, maybe, rather featherweight. It’s like Billy Joel’s ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’, but for France and with added bits of sex-life. Still: Nobel Prize!
Most of it is this kind of thing: ‘reserve soldiers continued to leave for Algeria … the SS France, the Caravelle jetliner and the Concorde, the Common Market and, sooner or later, peace in Algeria. There were new francs, scoubidoo bracelets, flavoured yoghurt, milk in cartons, transistor radios’ [76]. A hundred pages later it’s still going on, further down the cultural-historical line: ‘male voices compared PCs and Macs … they mentioned the latest cover of Charlie Hebdo and the most recent episodes of The X-Files, advised us to see Man Bites Dog and Reservoir Dogs’ [179]. Every now and again the running commentary is interrupted by passages like this:
Once in a while she looks at herself naked in the bathroom mirror. A delicate torso, small breasts, very slender waist, slightly rounded belly. The thighs are heavy with a bulge above the knee. The sex is clearly visible, now that the hair is more sparse, the cleft small compared with the ones displayed in X-rated films. She is surprised. It is the same body she’s had since she stopped growing at around the age of sixteen. [167]
A male novelist writing a passage like that would be, rightly I think, mocked. It is different coming from a woman’s pen I suppose. Still: after a while the obliqueness of all this notated specificity grows wearisome. ‘Solidarność, the Restaurants du Coeur, the release of Mandela … Hypermarkets expanded, shopping trolleys were replaced by others so big one could scarely touch the bottom. We changed television sets so that we could have a SCART plug and a VCR’ [141]. The boorishness of men is a repeated theme, and the way constant external change actually, paradoxically, construes a kind of inner changelessness is pretty well done. But I’m not sure the book puts the necessary distance between portraying banality, for satiric or social-commentary or even aesthetic reasons, and simply being banal.
On the internet all one needed do was enter a keyword and thousands of ‘sites’ would swarm on the screen. [208]
You don’t say! ‘We could research the symptoms of throat cancer, recipes for moussaka, the age of Catherine Deneuve, the weather in Osaka, the growing of hydrangeas …’ Yes, yes. Point taken.
It’s a 200-page novel that feels like a novella, an exercise in literary Pointillism that isn’t, or didn’t strike me, as much more than this gimmick. But conceivably (I don’t say this to snark) my reaction only reflects the boorishness of masculinity that the book, in part, critiques.
+++
Photo-Moderne, Cinémonde, German soldiers, Lillebonne
L’Hirondelle, Convent School, President de Gaulle;
De Beauvoir, long division, Les Muppets on television
Mireille Mathieu, Bjorn Borg and Emanuelle;
Bourgeois life, Maman/wife, Tirlipot, pastry slice,
Mitterand, Beatles song and Catcher in the Rye;
Panties, Debussy, visiting Seine-Saint-Denis
Canal+, reading Proust, sexual clichés home to roost.
We didn’t start the Ernaux
Til her Nobel Prizing made it worth appraising
Didn’t much enjoy the Ernaux
No, I’m just not sure if I will read much more of her.
