The Years

The novel The Years, published in France in 2008 and in Slovenia in 2010, is an autobiographical fiction by French writer Annie Ernaux, in which she describes her life’s journey from her birth in 1941 to the middle of the 21st century. Since its publication, the novel has won a number of top literary awards: the François Mauriac Prize, the Marguerite Duras Prize, the Télégramme Readers’ Prize and the Strega European Prize.

This unusual autobiography is written in the third person singular, and the author skilfully combines intimate stories with historical events in France, Europe and the world. One of Europe’s most prominent theatre directors, the Norwegian Eline Arbo, adapted The Years and put it on stage to great acclaim at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2024. In this production, she divided the role of Annie between five actresses of different ages, who embody the protagonist, her  close and distant relatives, friends, neighbours, lovers and her descendants at different stages of her life.

The stage narrative, which is a mixture of memories and self-reflection, is triggered by family, group and solo portrait photographs in which Annie is frozen in a specific time and place. We first glimpse her in a photograph taken in 1946 in her birthplace of Lillebonne, when memories of the horrors of the Second World War are still very much alive and her relatives are overwhelmed with joy and freedom. We follow her on a holiday on the seashore and while dreaming of a future in Paris. While her mother is fascinated by the latest wonder of technology – the washing machine – Annie begins to discover her body. The relationship to the body as a mysterious mixture of desire, pleasure, shame and pain is a theme that pervades all periods of her life – from her first painful sexual encounter with an older man and the liberating period of her student years to the traumatic illegal abortion, since France only legalised the right to abortion in 1970. Thus, we follow Annie in her search for an intimate and social identity in the emptiness of her marriage, the birth of her two sons, the burdens of motherhood, divorce, obsession with a younger lover, until in 2006 she becomes a self-conscious woman and a writer, dancing through her memories in search of a language that encompasses the complexity of human existence and preserves the fragments of her memories from the relentless flood of oblivion.

The last photograph of the stage adaptation could be a photographic portrait of Annie Ernaux on the occasion of gaining the Nobel Prize for Literature, which she received in 2022 as the seventeenth woman among the 119 laureates to date “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”, as the explanation reads. Annie Ernaux’s oeuvre comprises 20 books, mostly in the form of short stories and novels, but all of them fed by the tiny swirls of intimate memories that merge into the mighty streams of our common history.