The years

The years by Annie Ernaux ... what matters to her is capturing this temporal extension that her passage on earth in a certain era creates ... capturing this time that passed through her, this year in which she recorded only her inner self by living through it. And she sensed the shape of her writing based on another feeling. That feeling that overwhelms her when she perceives a fixed image of a memory – whether she is on a hospital bed with other children who underwent tonsil surgery after the war, or on a bus crossing Paris in July 68 – she melts into a majestic college, succeeding, thanks to critical awareness, in stripping away the elements that form her, one after the other... clothes, actions, words, etc. Thus, that tiny moment from the past grows and leads to a shifting horizon with a tone that is simultaneously homogeneous. A horizon that encompasses a year or many years. So she re-experiences, with a deep satisfaction bordering on amazement – not granted by the memory of a character alone – a kind of broad, collective feeling that her consciousness, indeed her entire being, is caught up in. Just as she fills herself, alone in her car on the highway, stuck in the vague college of the present world.