Annie Ernaux, _Les années_

THIS IS THE first book I have read by Nobel laureate Ernaux, and I understand it is atypical for her. She is a pioneer in autofiction (the term also exists in French, apparently), and most of her books are about particular eras or events in her own life. This one, while still autobiographical, is about the whole span of her life, from childhood up to the time it was published in 2008 (when Ernaux was 68). 

Les années is atypical in a more general way as well, as I find myself unable to think of another book quite like it. 

For one thing, it is as much her generation's "autobiography," one might say, as it is her own. She scrupulously avoids the first person, generally using instead the French pronoun "on"--"one," we might translate, although it also means something roughly like "you and me and just about everyone we know."

 The book's narrates from a point of view that aligns with Ernaux's own--her education, her marriage, her children, her career, her commitments--but is at the same time looking outwards, observing and recording, trying to map the social forces, fashion trends, and historical pressures experienced by anyone born in France circa 1940, especially anyone born female. "Une existence singulière donc mais fondue aussi dans le mouvement d'une génération" is how she puts it near the end of the book: in my own translation, "One person's existence, then, but also melted [dissolved?] into the movement [evolving?] of a generation." 

I can think of another book a little like that--Fintan O'Toole's We Don't Know Ourselves-- but it came out after Ernaux's, and it lacks the other astonishing dimension of Les Années: the ways its style evolves as she gets older.

I don't know quite how she did this, but the voice in the earlier sections sounds young--hesitant but fresh, naïve but energetic--and it metamorphoses gradually as experience accumulates into something maybe wiser, or maybe just more jaded, or deeper, or maybe just more tired...never less than graceful, though.

Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man does something a lot like this, but only up to age 23 or so, and it doesn't even try to represent a generation's experience.

The book has the effect of a  highly condensed Proust, the history of one consciousness in its historical generation boiled down to its essence in just 250 pages. It must be interesting to read this as a French person near Ernaux's age--a whole carton of madeleines. You'd be brought up against long-faded but arresting memories again and again. It must be interesting too to read it a long-time reader of Ernaux, as she revisits times and events she had written about earlier in her career, but from a new angle.

Every few pages, Ernaux makes an observation that just nails it--for instance, her noting near the end of the book that as adolescents we feel we are continually changing in a world that stubbornly stays the same, while in old age we feel we are staying the same in a world that is continually changing. We don't get it quite right in either case.