Day 34: Today's Pick — Annie Ernaux's *The Years*

I want to talk about a sentence.

The sentence is on page 14 of the English edition of Annie Ernaux's Les Années, which she titled in English The Years. The sentence describes, in passing, a 1950s French family meal — the white tablecloth, the children, the radio, the smell of a particular kind of cheese, the joke an uncle always told and which, even in 1953, was already not funny. The sentence ends, and you turn the page, and you realize that Ernaux has just walked you through a vast room full of people you have never met and made you feel, for sixty seconds, that you have lived among them all your life.

That is the trick of The Years, and it is the reason I am going to tell you, today, to read this book.

For anyone who hasn't met Ernaux yet: she is a French novelist and essayist, born in 1940, who in 2022 won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Years, originally published in French in 2008 and translated into English by Alison L. Strayer in 2017, is the book most people consider her masterwork. It is short — about 230 pages — and it covers, more or less, the period from her birth in Normandy in 1940 to roughly the year of writing.

Here's the move that makes the book remarkable: Ernaux never says "I." Not once. The book is written almost entirely in the first-person plural — "we" — with occasional shifts into a kind of distant, observational "she." She writes about herself the way you might describe a photograph of a stranger. The effect is uncanny. The Years is technically a memoir, but it reads like a piece of collective autobiography — the autobiography of a generation, a country, a class, a series of decades. Personal grief gets the same matter-of-fact tone as the introduction of frozen food. The first time you have sex appears in the same paragraph as the rise of supermarkets.

If that sounds depressing, it isn't. It's galvanizing. Reading The Years is like sitting next to someone on a long train and listening to them tell you about their entire life in a low, even voice while the countryside changes outside the window. The narrator does not editorialize. She describes. She describes brand names, slang phrases, ad jingles, family rituals, political events, the particular slant of light in a kitchen in 1972. Then she keeps moving.

What you take away from this book, if you are anything like me, is a strange, useful new feeling about your own life. Ernaux has built a model — a form — that says: a life is not a story. A life is a long accumulation of small descriptions, repeated, slightly modified, eventually retired, replaced. The Years convinces you that this is the real shape of being alive: not narrative arcs but slow weather.

Practical bits. The Strayer translation is the one to read; it's gorgeous, brisk, and never feels translated. The Years is a perfect vacation book — short, dense, the kind of thing you finish on a plane and immediately want to start again. It is also, I'd argue, a perfect 30th-birthday present, or 50th, or any point in your life when you've started to feel that the years are accelerating and you want someone smart and a little melancholy to tell you it's not just you.

You don't need to read Ernaux's other books before this one. (Though A Man's Place and Simple Passion are marvelous, and I will eventually run out of restraint and review them, too.) Just start here.

It will take you a Saturday. You will not be the same on Sunday.