What’s Leona Theis Reading?
I’ve just finished Nobel-laureate Annie Ernaux’s memoir The Years, translated from the French by Canadian Alison L. Strayer. Reading it is something like going on a road trip with the author. You’re sitting in the car together, and she’s at the wheel. Once in a while she’ll look over and tell you something personal, but all the while the social and political history of France from 1940 to 2007 rolls past the windows at speed: the Second World War, the Algerian War, AIDS, Mitterand, Chirac, Mitterand again. Students throwing cobblestones in 1968, unrest in the banlieus, kitchen-table abortions, on and on.
Floating in the car between you is the question, Where is the self in all this sweep of history and circumstance? When the narrator does take us into her own life, it’s through a series of
photographs. With every new photo she offers an unsentimental description of “the woman” in the photo— her circumstances, the particular place and time— using the pronoun she, not I. These photographs ground us, appearing just when we want to know more about how to locate the narrator herself in the midst of all this. And so we find clues that help us to fill in parts of her personal story: occupations, marriages, children, divorce, lovers.
Ernaux takes a moment here and there to refer to how she’ll assemble the writing project that’s been on her mind for decades, and which she calls a “impersonal autobiography.” This is, of course, the book in hand. She refers to decisions about pronouns and how best to speak about this woman she’s portraying. From time to time the narrator shifts away from she in favour of we, and readers see how the we of the tale—typically, her cohort—were implicated in all those events that flash by the car’s windows. What were their actions, their accommodations of thought and attitude. (It’s especially interesting to me to read The Years as I finalize edits on my own memoir, which also spans nearly seven decades. I don’t include the sweep of history the way she does, but I have spent considerable energy playing around with pronouns and settling on which to use, and when, and why.)
“Call it a novel or call it a memoir,” Ernaux writes. “She will go within herself only to retrieve the world … grasp the changes in ideas, beliefs, and sensibility….” The narrator says she wants “to capture the lived dimension of History.” Certainly she succeeds, questioning her own life and making space for readers to infer larger questions, all part of the same whole. This is a book to spend time inside rather than a book to march through. Each time I returned to it, I was fascinated with what Ernaux was doing and how she achieved it.
Leona Theis is a writer whose most recent novel is If Sylvie Has Nine Lives, and her memoir Chance after Chance is forthcoming with Thistledown in 2027. She lives on Treaty 6 territory in Saskatoon.