Les Annees, A. Ernaux

22 june

What if you are cursed as the chinese curse goes, “I wish you to live in interesting years”? I suppose that you do your best to stay afloat, you move with the (interesting) events as much as you can, yo fight the anonymity of the contant change by anchoring yourself at moments, at reference points. If you are a writer, actually, you might even consider to write about your years. And that is what Annie Ernaux does in her book Les annees (the years).

I was easily caught, probably because it starts with a girl describing herself at a beach in Normandy, on holidays. Which is also the place where I have enjoyed lovely holidays in the last few years. But I can imagine that it is, also, an irritating book. Our protagonist, the girl who is also the writer, is born around the end of WWII and the book covers -in couple of hundred pages- up to 2006. The writer describes, with a undoubted french flair and perspective, the passing of these years, certainly interesting.  And in doing so, it seems that she is working hard for giving, or creating, a position for herself in space and time. Who are we, after all? Are we not our times? And what if our times keep changing, keep bringing societal upheavals? 

Who are we? 

I said that this could be an irritating book, surely if you are living through our own interesting years. One might begin to suspect that all years are interesting, and that the attempt of Ernaux is just a subterfuge to gain attention, to make herself more interesting than she actually is. Alternatively, it might very well be that many people do not think that their own years are specially interesting, no matter how much the mores change. There is, also, people that has not been gifted, or cursed, with the impulse of the writer to document her life in order to make sense of it. So probably, for these people, this is yet another book written by an arrogant french that believes herself to be at the center of an era, of a human age. It can also be that the forceful vagueness of the history, the mandatory lack of detail when fitting a life and the period between the forties and the noughties in 200 pages is the annoying factor. A friend told me that Christa Wolf, faced with a similar proposition, decided to fully describe one day in a year, for forty years. Not surprisingly, the book is called “A day a year: 1960-2000”. I suppose that is also a way to tackle the same hitch, to deal with the same urge. I still have to read Wolf, and I wonder what will I think about it. 

I do love Ernaux.

In the end, I think, what clinches it for me is that Ernaux depicts herself, or her generation, fighting against the anonymity of change. In many ways I can see that this is how many french might feel about this time, as citizens of a country that has been a great power, but so many things change in so short time that there is no connection anymore with the glorious past, and no certainty whatsoever about some replacing narrative. But is certainly not a feeling exclusive to the french. I believe that a great deal of the politics of today are precisely about the great sense of uncertainty that many of our citizens have. And that is the, if not discovery, fascinating retelling that this book does for me. Progress we have had, and we are still having. I am a progressist, I believe that change is good and I work for it every other moment. But what if change is the problem? What if the constant, ongoing assault of a changing reality prevent you to be you, prevents you to answer clearly the question who am I? what do you do then? 

Well, you might as well do what Ernaux does, at least as I read her. You might define yourself by the change itself, and you might cut yourself loose from a fixed and well defined identity. You might stop being a french… or an argentinian, or even a biologist! you might be… just you? 

That would be, almost, zen.