Zach's Reviews > The Years

i can completely understand why this is the sun from which all of ernaux's other books are satellites and planets and small asteroids in hurtling transit of emotional space... it's certainly what pinned her the nobel prize, the award that sent me on my now two year endeavor through her bibliography. and while this isn't my favorite of her novels, it is an accomplishment that one could not dare describe as anything less than a masterpiece, a magnum opus, the kind of nouns people throw at anything daunting in its spectacular scope. but this is more than anything else you'll read, a lurching mass of Scope and Scale that hauls over a half century of french history in the breathless, vivid body of one microsmatic life. cultural history and autobiography mingle into a fresco of humanity that reflects the very movement of time itself... slow in the past and increasingly faster, more urgent, out of control, frenzied. but to make still that speed is the masterstroke of the effort, affirmative of a beauty and essential truth in the art of literature and creative expression.

ernaux describes too many things too beautifully for me to pick a single favorite quote, but here's just one from the top of my notebook: "we would be amazed to find ourselves a part of this huge and nebulous population whose dim roar, rising from the highways morning and night, seemed to imbue us with an invisible and powerful reality."