The Years: Annie Ernaux

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She would like to assemble these multiple images of herself, separate and discordant, thread them together with the story of her existence, starting with her birth during World War II up until the present day.

It spans politics, literature, music, television, education, marriage, divorce, advertisements, popular slogans – all recounted through a narrator who never once uses the word “I’. Life, caught up in meaningless rituals, feels as if it’s slipping by, but at the same time “progress” has landed us in a place we no longer recognize. As someone also born in 1940, but in the United States, not France, I found her memories both familiar and distancing. 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.We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure. All of her work blends together her own personal experiences as well as collective historical experiences to create heartbreakingly beautiful memoirs that take the reader by the hand and gently lead them through the passing of time. The author’s voice continually dissolves and re-emerges as Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable.

Now, she says, they are “like production lines”, the demand for signatures and selfies outstripping opportunities to actually connect. Ernaux was raised in a traditional working-class Roman Catholic family in Normandy, and the first two-thirds of her book is generational; it is the world Édouard Louis so brilliantly updated and dramatized in his recent novel, “The End of Eddy. Many people go to Ernaux for passion, relationships and the human condition, so Exteriors feels slightly out of sync with her other work. At this point in the story, Ernaux has grandchildren and deals with a number of struggles — including chemotherapy. A) powerful attempt to grasp history through "material" memory, and to describe the evolution of attitudes, events, and, as importantly, things.she asks, excitedly springing from her seat, forgetting where she’s put her smartphone (“I’m awful with these things”). Ernaux is always an anti-sentimentalist, never seeking or needing pity from the reader, but especially here. It is comprised of her own memories, of historical events, of scraps of popular culture, slang, notes on the subtle transformations of the culture. Ernaux comes to despise Christmas, “the most grueling period of desire and hatred of things, the peak of the consumer year. In moving, powerful prose, SyrianDustis a record of a freelance war reporter confronting the many-factioned conflict being fought against Bashar al Assad.