I often have the strange impression that I was born in the wrong century. I would have loved to have been a student in the Paris of the 1960s, where knowledge was palpable in the high school or the university benches, in the teacher, the intellectual, the scholar that you had to meet to understand his theories, in the novels and the weight of encyclopedias in our hands… A time where knowledge was not readily accessible but demanded an effort:  running to the library, knocking on a door, moving piles of books, but, above all, human contact. I envy this other age when things were slower, when we were required to rely more heavily on our senses, when we had enough days or even months to grapple with and find meaning in a reading … I am jealous of this atmosphere propitious to idealists and Utopians – they were given time and space to develop their creativity, they dreamed of changing everything and they tried…

The latest novel by Anne Wiazemsky, Une année studieuse (Literally, A Studious Year) brings us back to this ancient time gone by through the back door… In 1966, Anne, the granddaughter of the famous French author Francois Mauriac (and the daughter of Claire Mauriac, whose story is recounted in Wiazemsky’s My Berlin Child*) is in Paris, revising for the September session of the baccalaureate. In the French capital, student leaders, as well as cultural and political figures are starting to criticize the rampant class discrimination within French society – discussions which will eventually lead to the great student protests of 1968 and later on to material society changes. Anne one day writes a letter to filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, whom she met briefly on a film set a year earlier. This is the starting point of a very unique love story. Twenty years older, and a radical left-wing filmmaker, his sudden intrusion into Anne’s life rapidly clashes with her extremely traditional, very right-wing family environment.  As she discovers sensuality, Anne also discovers Godard’s consuming jealousy, and embraces philosophy at the University of Nanterre. It is here that she is confronted by the political rallies of the students who will later lead the demonstrations in May 1968…

I would have loved to live this studious year, not so much for the love initiation as to have known this end of the sixties Paris full of accessible intellectuals roiling with political and artistic passion.  What struck me in this novel is Anne Wiazemsky’s brilliant ability to recreate the Sixties’ singularity, its lively intellectual exchanges, where opponents deeply respected one another – the single conversation between Francois Mauriac and Jean-Luc Godard is, in that respect, a model of its kind. Wiazemsky revives this intensely creative moment where intellectual debates surfaced everywhere; where reading was a means to better understand one another; where giving books was like giving a piece of oneself, a sort of language and the extension of heated discussions; where you, as an individual, did not exist if you were not an avid reader….

Terribly Parisian and a true invitation to the past, Une année studieuse offers a few hours of literature in the setting of a black and white postcard. I hope you will enjoy those few moments in a now-extinct intellectual landscape as much as I did; another time, distant, outdated, but, in retrospect, exquisitely obsolete.

 WIAZEMSKY Anne, Une année studieuse, 2012, Gallimard, Paris. It will likely be translated into English within a year, possibly with Europa Edition.

* WIAZEMSKY Anne, My Berlin child, 2011, 2011, Europa Editions, Rome.