The years (les années in French)
The Years
Through the eyes of a French woman, we see a kaleidoscopic view of the world between her birth in 1940 and 2007. The book is brisk, with many references to changes in France over those years. The telling is via a collage of ‘moments’ taken from everything from film posters, political slogans, best-selling books and key events, to two stories, one told in a ‘we’ voice, and one via a third-person ‘she’ – the latter, disruptively, the most intimate. The inner and outer lives are thus represented, from the big events that a generation experiences (May 1968, 9/11) to the atomized life of an individual.
