The Years – WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE E-Book

Annie Ernaux

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Considered by many to be the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate's defining work, The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and collective, and a new genre – the collective autobiography – in order to capture the passing of time. At the confluence of autofiction and sociology, The Years is 'a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism' (New York Times), a monumental account of twentieth-century French history as refracted through the life of one woman.

Leseprobe

‘The Years is a revolution, not only in the art of autobiography but in art itself. Annie Ernaux’s book blends memories, dreams, facts and meditations into a unique evocation of the times in which we lived, and live.’

— John Banville, author of Mrs Osmond

‘One of the best books you will ever read.’

— Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk

‘The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux’s work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething.’

— Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy

‘Ravishing and almost oracular with insight, Ernaux’s prose performs an extraordinary dance between collective and intimate, “big” history and private experience. The Years is a philosophical meditation paced as a rollercoaster ride through the decades. How we spend ourselves too quickly, how we reach for meaning but evade it, how to live, how to remember – these are Ernaux’s themes. I am desperate for more.’

— Kapka Kassabova, author of Border

‘I admire the form she invented, mixing autobiography, history, sociology. The anxious interrogations on her defection, moving as she did from the dominated to the dominant classes. Her loyalty to her people, her fidelity to herself. The progressive depersonalisation of her work, culminating in the disappearance of the “I” in The Years, a book I must have read three or four times since its publication, even more impressed each time by its precision, its sweep and – I can’t think of any other word – its majesty. One of the few indisputably great books of contemporary literature.’

— Emmanuel Carrère, author of The Kingdom

‘Attentive, communal and genuinely new, Annie Ernaux’s The Years is an astonishing achievement.’

— Olivia Laing, author of Crudo

‘A book of memory, of a life and world, staggeringly and brilliantly original.’

— Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

‘This is an autobiography unlike any you have ever read. The Years is an earnest, fearless book, a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism, for our period of absolute commodity fetishism.’

— Edmund White, New York Times Book Review

‘A completely new form of autobiographical writing.’

— Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

‘A major European writer.’

— Times Literary Supplement

‘For those still doubting Annie Ernaux’s place in French literature – she’s right at the top – we cannot recommend reading The Years enough. The breadth of scope and stylistic control of the work offer a masterful dive into the passing of time and the memories of one woman over the course of sixty years.’

— Le Monde

‘Annie Ernaux’s work is autobiographical, discreet, withholding nothing yet enormously sensitive, precise, and minimalist. … She doesn’t just tell stories but, better put, tells her own story above all others, yet without falling into intimate revelations whatsoever, distancing herself from subjectivity, and considers literature as a sort of ethnology, something of an “intervention” into the culture which surrounds her.’

— El País

‘Reading Annie Ernaux is a shock, an experience, especially important. With her, the private becomes political, politics is brought into conversation, and from all this explosive, up-to-date and poetic literature becomes … a masterpiece.’

— Nils Minkmar, LiteraturSPIEGEL

‘The Years is a creative memoir, not only of an individual but of a generation and, indeed, an entire nation. … Beautifully presented – and surprisingly far- and deep-reaching – The Years is wonderful both as a chronicle of post-war French life (and so many of its changes) and a more universal memory-study.’

— Complete Review

‘The Years is unsentimental and distant in tone, flattening out the trajectory of Ernaux’s singular life by telling a grander narrative in which the weight of history acts upon an individual life. It is not a work of autofiction but rather one of autosociobiographie, a term Ernaux coined. … The connection between In Search of Lost Time and The Years is easy to make; both works are above all preoccupied with memory and the passage of time. … It is this legacy that reverberates as Ernaux relates the story of a generation born too late to remember the widespread poverty of the war and into a world of rapidly changing technologies, sexual mores, and class distinctions.’

— Bookforum

‘A masterful account of sixty years of French life, from 1940 to 2006, where personal memories, absent photos, diary entries and historical notes are fused together. … A magnificent text which glides effortlessly from the individual to the collective.’

— L’Express

THE YEARS

ANNIE ERNAUX

Translated by

ALISON L. STRAYER

‘All we have is our history, and it does not belong to us.’

— José Ortega y Gasset

‘Yes. They’ll forget us. Such is our fate, there is no help for it. What seems to us serious, significant, very important, will one day be forgotten or will seem unimportant. And it’s curious that we can’t possibly tell what exactly will be considered great and important, and what will seem petty and ridiculous. … 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…’

— Anton Chekhov, tr. Constance Garnett

Contents

Title PageEpigraphThe YearsAbout the AuthorsCopyright

THE YEARS

The Years

All the images will disappear:

the woman who squatted to urinate in broad daylight, behind the shack that served coffee at the edge of the ruins in Yvetot, after the war, who stood, skirts lifted, to pull up her underwear and then returned to the café

the tearful face of Alida Valli as she danced with Georges Wilson in the film The Long Absence

the man passed on the pavement in Padua in the summer of 1990, his hands fused with his shoulders, instantly summoning the memory of thalidomide, prescribed to pregnant women for nausea thirty years before, and of a joke people told later: an expectant mother knits the baby’s layette while gulping thalidomide pills at regular intervals – a row, a pill, a row, a pill. A friend says in horror, Stop, don’t you realize your baby may be born without arms, and the other answers, It’s okay, I don’t know how to knit sleeves anyway

Claude Piéplu leads a regiment of légionnaires, waving a flag in one hand and leading a goat with the other, in a Les Charlots film

the majesty of the elderly woman with Alzheimer’s, who wore a flowered smock like all the residents of the old folks’ home, but with a blue shawl over her shoulders, tirelessly pacing the corridors, haughty like the Duchess of Guermantes in the Bois de Boulogne, and who made you think of Céleste Albaret as she’d appeared one night on television with Bernard Pivot

on an outdoor stage, the woman shut into a box pierced all the way through by men with silver spears – and emerging alive because it was a magic trick, called The Martyrdom of a Woman

the mummies clothed in tattered lace, dangling from the walls of the Convento dei Cappuccini in Palermo

Simone Signoret’s face on the poster for Thérèse Raquin

the shoe rotating on a pedestal in an André shop, rue du Gros-Horloge in Rouen, the same phrase continuously scrolling around it – With Babybotte, Baby trots and grows well

the stranger of Termini Station in Rome, who half lowered the blind of his first-class compartment and in profile, hidden from the waist up, dandled his sex in the direction of the young women in the train on the opposite platform, leaning against the railings, chins in hands

the guy in a cinema ad for Paic Vaisselle dishwashing liquid, cheerfully breaking dirty dishes instead of washing them while an offscreen voice sternly intoned ‘That is not the solution!’ and the man, gazing at the audience in despair, asked ‘But what is the solution?’

the beach at Arenys de Mar, next to a railway line, the hotel guest who looked like Zappy Max

the newborn flailed in the air like a skinned rabbit in the delivery room of the Clinique Caudéran Pasteur, found again half an hour later, dressed and sleeping on his side in a little bed, one hand out, and the sheet pulled up to his shoulders

the dashing figure of the actor Philippe Lemaire, married to Juliette Gréco

in an advert on TV, the father who hides behind his newspaper, trying in vain to toss a Picorette in the air and catch it in his mouth, like his little girl

a house with a vine-covered arbour which was a hotel in the sixties, no. 90A, on the Zattere in Venice

the hundreds of petrified faces, photographed by the authorities before deportation to the camps, on the walls of a room in the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, in the mid-1980s

the lavatories built above the river, in the courtyard behind the house in Lillebonne, the excrements mixed with paper borne away by the gently lapping water

all the twilight images of the early years, the pools of light from a summer Sunday, images from dreams in which the dead parents come back to life, and you walk down indefinable roads

the image of Scarlett O’Hara dragging the Yankee soldier she has just killed up the stairs, then running through the streets of Atlanta in search of a doctor for Melanie, who is about to give birth

of Molly Bloom, who lies next to her husband, remembering the first time a boy kissed her and she said yes yes yes

of Elizabeth Drummond, murdered with her parents on a road in Lurs in 1952

the images, real or imaginary, that follow us all the way into sleep the images of a moment bathed in a light that is theirs alone

They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.

Thousands of words, the ones used to name things, faces, acts and feelings, to put the world in order, make the heart beat and the sex grow moist, will suddenly be nullified.

slogans, graffiti in public toilets, on walls in the street, poems and dirty jokes, headlines

anamnesis, epigone, noema, theoretical, the terms written in a notebook alongside their meanings so you didn’t need to look them up each time

turns of phrase that others used without a thought and which we doubted we’d ever be able to use, undeniably, one cannot fail to notice that

dreadful sentences one should have forgotten, more tenacious than others due to the effort expended in suppressing them, you look like a decrepit whore

the words of men in bed at night, Do with me what you will, I am your play-thing

to exist is to drink oneself dry

what were you doing on 11 September 2001?

in illo tempore at Mass on Sunday

old geezer, hullabaloo, a turn up for the books! You little nincompoop, outdated expressions, heard again by chance, suddenly precious as objects lost and found again, a wonder they’ve been saved from oblivion

the words forever bound to certain people, like mottos, or to a specific spot on the N14 because a passenger happened to say them just as we were driving by, and we cannot pass that place again without the words leaping up like the buried water jets at the Summer Palace of Peter the Great, which spray when you walk across them

the grammar book examples, quotes, insults, songs, sentences copied into notebooks when we were teens

l’abbé Trublet compilait, compilait, compilait

glory for a woman is the dazzling mourning of happiness

our memory is outside us, in a rainy breath of time

perfection for a nun is to spend her life as a virgin and to die as a saint

saucy spoonerisms: the acrobats displayed some cunning stunts, the explorer puts his mess in the cashbox

it was a lucky charm, a little pig with a heart / that she bought at the market for a hundred sous / a hundred sous is a pittance, between me and you

my story is a story of love

can you tirlipoter with a fork? Can you put schmilblick in a baby bottle?

(I’m capable of the best and the worst, but at being the worst I’m the best! so if you’re happy, why don’t you laugh? I’ll be brief, said King Pepin the Short and climbing out of the monster’s belly, Jonas declared, you don’t need to be a brain sturgeon to know that’s dolphinitely no minnow – the puns heard a thousand times, which had ceased to amuse or amaze us long ago; hackneyed, only irritating, they served no purpose but to consolidate the family esprit de corps, and disappeared when the couple blew apart though still sprang to mind sometimes, incongruous, inappropriate outside of the former tribe – basically, all that remained of it, after years of separation)

words that we are astonished ever existed – mastoc, hefty (Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet), pioncer, to kip (George Sand to Flaubert)

Latin and English, Russian learned in six months for a Soviet, only thing left of it now da svidania, ya tebia lioubliou kharacho

what is marriage? A con-promise

metaphors so tired it was astonishing to see others daring to utter them, the icing on the cake

O Mother buried outside the first garden

pédaler à côté du vélo, to pedal next to the bicycle (wasted effort) became pédaler dans la choucroûte, to pedal in sauerkraut (going nowhere fast), then pedalling in semolina (to go round in circles), then nothing – obsolete expressions

the men’s words we didn’t like, come, tossing off

those learned at school that gave you a feeling of mastery over the world. Once the exam was over, they flew out of your head more quickly than they had entered

the phrases repeated by grandparents that set one’s teeth on edge, and those of the parents which after their deaths remained more alive than their faces, curiosity killed the cat, little jugs have big ears

the old brands, short-lived, the memories of which delighted you more than those of better-known brands, Dulsol shampoo, Cardon chocolate, Nadi coffee – like an intimate memory, impossible to share

The Cranes Are Flying

Marianne of My Youth

Madame Soleil is still with us

the world is suffering from lack of faith in a transcendental truth

Everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it. Nothing will come out of the open mouth, neither I nor me. Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.

It is a sepia photo, oval-shaped, glued inside a little cardboard folder with a gold border and protected by a sheet of embossed, semi-transparent paper. Below are the words: Photo-Moderne, Ridel, Lillebonne (S.Inf.re). Tel. 80. A fat baby with a full, pouty lower lip and brown hair pulled up into a big curl sits half-naked on a cushion in the middle of a carved table. The misty background, the sculpted garland of the table, the embroidered chemise that rides up over the belly (the baby’s hand hides its sex), the strap slipping from the shoulder onto the chubby arm suggest a cupid or a cherub from a painting. All the relatives must have received a print and immediately tried to discern whose side the child took after. In this piece of family archive, which must date from 1941, it is impossible not to read a ritual petit bourgeois staging for the entrance into the world.

Another photo, stamped by the same photographer – the folder is of lesser quality, the gold border has disappeared – and probably destined for the same distribution within the family, shows a little girl of about four, serious, almost sad despite her nice plump face under short hair, parted down the middle and pulled back with barrettes to which little bow-ties are attached, like butterflies. Her left hand rests on the same carved Louis XVI–style table, which is fully visible. She bulges out of her bodice, her skirt with shoulder straps hiked up a little over a protuberant belly, possibly a sign of rickets (circa 1944).

Two other small photos with serrated edges, very likely taken the same year, show the same child, slimmer, in a flounced dress with puff sleeves. In the first one, she nestles playfully against a stout woman, whose body is a solid mass in a wide-striped dress, her hair swept up in two big buns. In the other photo, the child’s left hand is raised, fist closed, the right one held back by the hand of a man. He is tall with a light-coloured jacket and pleated trousers, his bearing nonchalant. Both photos were taken on the same day in a cobbled courtyard, in front of a low wall with a floral border along the top. A clothesline hangs above their heads, a solitary clothespin still hooked over it.

On holiday afternoons after the war, amidst the interminable slowness of meals, time appeared out of nowhere and began to take shape, the time which the parents seemed to be staring at, eyes unfocused, when they forgot to answer us, the time where we were not and never would be, the time before. The voices of the guests flowed together to compose the great narrative of collective events, which we came to believe we too had witnessed.

They never grew tired of talking about the winter of ’42, the bone-chilling cold, the hunger and the swedes, the food provisions and tobacco vouchers, the bombardments the aurora borealis that heralded the coming of the war the bicycles and carts on the roads during the Débâcle the looted shops the displaced searching the debris for their photos and their money the arrival of the Germans – every person at the table could say exactly where, in what city – and the always courteous English, the inconsiderate Americans, the collabos, the neighbour in the Resistance, X’s daughter whose head was shaved after the Liberation Le Havre razed to the ground, where nothing at all remained, the black market Propaganda the Krauts fleeing across the Seine at Caudébec on knackered horses the countrywoman who loudly farted in a train compartment full of Germans and proclaimed to all and sundry, ‘If we can’t tell it, we’ll make them smell it!’

From a common ground of hunger and fear, everything was told in the ‘we’ voice and with impersonal pronouns, as if everyone were equally affected by events.

Shrugging their shoulders, they spoke of Pétain, too old and already gaga when he was brought back into action for want of someone better. They imitated the flight and rumble of V-2s circling above, mimed past terrors, feigning their own careful deliberations at critical moments, What do I do now, to keep us in suspense.

It was a story replete with violence, destruction, and death, narrated with glee, belied at intervals, it seemed, by a stirring and solemn ‘It must never happen again’, followed by a silence like a warning for the benefit of some obscure authority, remorse in the wake of pleasure.