Take a photo of a barcode or cover
frasersimons 's review for:
The Years
by Annie Ernaux
Absolutely incredible and singular. I really enjoyed consuming this and approaching it like a puzzle, essentially. The act of reading while asking yourself, ‘What is this?’ Is actually really exciting. It’s not often you engage with something new to form. Or it isn’t for me, anyway.
Neither memoir or fiction, Ernaux attempts a time capsule encapsulating herself, representing, well, the culture of the time. Through thousands of notes and retreading old memory and sensations, she bottles the scent of recollection. She isn’t the subject; if anything, time and culture seem to be, in so far as they can be. They collide and bleed into one another. In so doing, illustrating the cycle of history and plucking the trends of culture that come back into fashion and recede, like sediment on a beach with the tide coming in.
It is fascinating that she uses the collective We for most things as well. Admitting a kind of complicity in the madness of crowds and sweeping energy of certain of notions taking everyone up, including her. Even if, at the time, she may not have thought and felt those things exactly, through the product of her memory, sifted through time, it appears that way regardless to her. That’s what happens when specificity cannot be obtained, I guess. There are the many small impressions and the inability to discern agency, so it is we and all of us. A collective responsibility that no one ever calls to account.
The tide of culture and nations continue to sew trends, probably courting longer memories; institutional ones. Or perhaps subservient to them like any other person. It does seem like the older people get, it becomes a ‘had to be there moment’. Except these moments bare a pretty startling resemblance to some that are occurring right now. Everything old is new again. And we just can’t seem to erect a structure that benefits from the collective intellect. Like a newborn, and their subsequent milestones, the collective memory is erased to make use of, or more likely, to protect itself from those ever damaging tides.
Neither memoir or fiction, Ernaux attempts a time capsule encapsulating herself, representing, well, the culture of the time. Through thousands of notes and retreading old memory and sensations, she bottles the scent of recollection. She isn’t the subject; if anything, time and culture seem to be, in so far as they can be. They collide and bleed into one another. In so doing, illustrating the cycle of history and plucking the trends of culture that come back into fashion and recede, like sediment on a beach with the tide coming in.
It is fascinating that she uses the collective We for most things as well. Admitting a kind of complicity in the madness of crowds and sweeping energy of certain of notions taking everyone up, including her. Even if, at the time, she may not have thought and felt those things exactly, through the product of her memory, sifted through time, it appears that way regardless to her. That’s what happens when specificity cannot be obtained, I guess. There are the many small impressions and the inability to discern agency, so it is we and all of us. A collective responsibility that no one ever calls to account.
The tide of culture and nations continue to sew trends, probably courting longer memories; institutional ones. Or perhaps subservient to them like any other person. It does seem like the older people get, it becomes a ‘had to be there moment’. Except these moments bare a pretty startling resemblance to some that are occurring right now. Everything old is new again. And we just can’t seem to erect a structure that benefits from the collective intellect. Like a newborn, and their subsequent milestones, the collective memory is erased to make use of, or more likely, to protect itself from those ever damaging tides.