#feministfriday episode 517 | The Years
Hi everyone,
How are you doing this sunny afternoon? Well, I hope. I'm going to see The Years at the Almeida, so here is a Fem Fri about that.
Let's start with an interview with Eline Arbo, the director of the play:
She grew up in Tromso, in the far north of Norway: a wildly picturesque landscape of fjords and mountains and a place where light comes in extremes (midnight sun in the summer, near constant darkness in the winter). That Arctic beauty has left its mark on both her and her work, she says. “There is a lot of respect for nature. People die every year in the mountains. You have to really have respect for something bigger than yourself, you become philosophical.”
https://www.ft.com/content/6d3a5de5-aabf-43cb-938a-01cd483a660e
Now, here is a long article about Annie Ernaux, who wrote the work on which The Years is based:
writing about her father in the early 1980s, more than a decade after his death, she didn’t want to make a gravestone for him, to produce something ‘moving’ or ‘gripping’. As she collected his ‘words, tastes and mannerisms’ in her writing, ‘the external evidence’ of his existence, she found herself reminiscing and then, catching herself in the act, would tear herself away from ‘the subjective point of view’. Her intention was not to commemorate or reanimate him but to discover the ‘nature and limits of the world where my father lived’. She was attempting to see him from the point of view of history and from the point of view of his daughter, to see the bones and the tombstone at once.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n20/joanna-biggs/the-palimpsest-sensation
This book sounds great! It's not the one The Years is based on but maybe I should read it.
Love,
Alex.