24/07/2026
“All the images will disappear”
Thus begins Annie Ernaux’s memoir, Les Années (translated into English by Alison Strayer as The Years, Seven Stories Press, 2017), a narrative at once monumental and microscopic encompassing broad historical swathes while retaining a seismographic sensitivity to the calibrations of everyday life. The product is an intricately woven experiment with narrative scale and intersecting temporalities, that foregrounds the position of the individual subject in relation to national (and global) histories. The Years offers the individual life as an alternative, private archive through the optic of which dominant historiography can be refracted to acquire an expanded focal range and new methodological tools.
Read “Against Amnesia”, a review of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, where private memory meets collective history, by Paromita Patranobish (Dr. Paromita Patranobish )