I was just finishing Marguerite Duras's The Lover (1984) when a friend lent me her copy of Annie Ernaux's The Years (2008). Unlike Duras's book, which was translated into English by Barbara Bray almost immediately after it was first published in French, it took nine years for Alison L. Strayer's gorgeous and thoughtful English translation.
The Years has no proper beginning but a series of notes that could be things overheard by a child under-six who would not have a context for them (Ernaux was born in 1940). Thus, notes as a kind of kindling gathered to start the fire that is the child's conscious life, a life whose first enduring memories are grounded in the ordered recurrence of state schooling.
On Page 26, Ernaux writes:
"Memory was transmitted not only through the stories but through the ways of walking, sitting, talking, laughing, eating, hailing someone, grabbing hold of objects. It passed body to body, over the years, from the remotest countrysides of France to other parts of Europe: a heritage unseen in the photos, lying beyond individual difference and the gaps between the goodness of some and the wickedness of others."
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