1992

1992 marks the opening of the novel and the summer Anthony Casati turns fourteen. It is a point of departure rather than a self-contained episode: a season attached to the beginning of Anthony’s story, which the narration presents as something that had to start somewhere. The year’s importance lies in the way it fixes that beginning while the book gradually sets it against longer family and social histories.

The Opening Year

The book identifies 1992 before introducing its first section, making the year an explicit frame for the story’s opening. Anthony is fourteen that summer. In the nearby sequence, he and his cousin have hidden a canoe and ride their bicycles home through the Petit-Fougeray woods; Anthony’s habitual slaloming across the road’s center-line dashes is another small sign of the heedless confidence of that age. These details give the opening time a physical scale: adolescence begins not as an abstract life stage but amid local roads, woods, and risky habits.

The introduction of Stéphanie Chaussoy is connected to this threshold. The narration identifies her and then places the summer of Anthony’s fourteenth birthday as the point from which events begin. The year therefore serves as both a calendar marker and a narrative hinge: it locates the start of a relationship and a larger sequence of changes without suggesting that the lives described in the novel can be contained by one summer.

Earlier Lives and Longer Clocks

The novel’s treatment of time widens beyond Anthony’s opening year through memories of older generations. Hélène Casati recalls being seventeen, when she and her sister danced, skipped classes, listened to the radio, and resisted the expectations imposed on young women in their neighborhood. This remembered youth belongs to an earlier period, not to 1992; its placement alongside the younger generation’s story makes the passage of time visible through changing ages and persistent social constraints.

Patrick Casati’s reflections offer another scale. He remembers childhood summers as expansive stretches spent outdoors with his brothers and their friends, followed by summers interrupted by work, girls, and motorbikes. Adult life narrows that time into three weeks of paid vacation; unemployment brings slower summers marked by guilt and brooding. His comparison turns the seasons into measures of a life whose opportunities and sense of purpose have contracted.

A Year Against Industrial Decline

The book’s family timelines unfold against the decline of the region’s factories. Its account of working-class women describes lives shaped by pregnancies and by husbands who were fired, depressed, violent, or unemployed. The closure of the factories and the silence of the blast furnaces mark a change extending beyond any single year: the crisis has become a lasting condition, inherited by families and felt across generations.

That history gives 1992 a double significance. It names the point at which Anthony’s story begins, but the surrounding narrative resists treating a beginning as a clean break. Hélène’s earlier youth, Patrick’s changing experience of the summers, and the industrial losses that bear on the family all stretch the reader’s sense of time beyond Anthony’s adolescence. The opening year is thus a firm chronological threshold set within a much longer history of desire, work, and diminished prospects.