The Years: Annie Ernaux

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Ce qu'ils disent ou rien, Paris: Gallimard, 1977; French & European Publications, Incorporated, 1989, ISBN 978-0-7859-2655-9 Annie Ernaux receiving the 2022 Nobel prize in literature from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

Her debut was Les armoires vides, published in 1974 in France and as Cleaned Out in English in 1990. It was her fourth book, La place or A Man’s Place, that was her literary breakthrough. Les Années Super-8 d'Annie Ernaux et David Ernaux-Briot". ActuaLitté. 29 July 2022. Archived from the original on 21 September 2022 . Retrieved 21 September 2022. the image of Scarlett O’Hara dragging the Yankee soldier she has just killed up the stairs, then running through the streets of Atlanta in search of a doctor for Melanie, who is about to give birthAnnie Ernaux's book is autobiography, but it is written, as translator Alison L. Strayer notes, in the " je collectif" -- a nice way of putting first-person plural (which Strayer explains: "I translate mostly as 'we' but sometimes as 'one' for formality or rhythm or simply because it is the only choice that presents itself"). Ferniot, Christine (1 November 2005). "1983: La place par Annie Ernaux". L'EXPRESS (in French). Archived from the original on 29 October 2010 . Retrieved 31 October 2010. Born in 1940, Annie Ernaux grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and later taught at secondary school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d’Enseignement par Correspondance.In 2017, Annie Ernaux was awarded the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her life’s work. In 2022, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Elkin, Lauren (26 October 2018). "Bad Genre: Annie Ernaux, Autofiction, and Finding a Voice". The Paris Review. Archived from the original on 9 August 2022 . Retrieved 18 April 2019. She notes the advent and spread, slow and fast, of the personal landline telephone (and eventually the cellphone), television, and ultimately computers. La Cergyssoise Annie Ernaux décroche le prix Nobel de littérature". actu.fr. 6 October 2022. Archived from the original on 6 October 2022 . Retrieved 7 October 2022.Laurin, Danielle (3 April 2008). "Autobiographie: Les années: le livre d'une vie" (in French). Radio-Canada . Retrieved 31 October 2010.

Schwartz, Madeleine (13 April 2020). "A Memoirist Who Mistrusts Her Own Memories". The New Yorker . Retrieved 8 August 2023. Yet there's more than enough substance here to make for a rich and very rewarding reading-experience even for those for whom this is entirely foreign. The experiences are hers, but mostly shared: from school curriculum and what they read, to food, lifestyle, topics of conversation and concern. The Yearsis an earnest, fearless book, a Remembrance of Things Pastfor our age of media domination and consumerism, for our period of absolute commodity fetishism.” —Edmund White, The New York Times Book Review Beautifully presented -- and surprisingly far- and deep-reaching --, The Years is wonderful both as a chronicle of post-war French life (and so many of its changes) and a more universal memory-study.In the press release accompanying the Nobel announcement, it was said that Ernaux had been awarded the prize “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Yet clinical feels too chilly a word to describe Ernaux’s lifelong effort to include the marginalised and forgotten within the lofty corridors of literature. “I have never spoken of cold things,” she affirms. They will all vanish at the same time, like the millions of images that lay behind the foreheads of the grandparents, dead for half a century, and of the parents, also dead. Images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. Like sexual desire, memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history. The Years dilates the genre from a record of the intimate and subjective to an account of collective experience. It is a masterly and audacious work that dares to speak for a generation, and to do so at a time when, as Ernaux observes, photographs and films are supplanting human recollection, bringing "another form of past ... into being ... with little real memory content". (...) The Years is also notable for the weight of sociological data it contains, and for its passionate taxonomies, seizing on each new realm of human ingenuity and productivity." - Kate Webb, Times Literary Supplement I’ve just finished Happening by Annie Ernaux, in which she writes about her experience of unwanted pregnancy and illegal abortion in 1960s France. The Yearswas one of my favourite reads of last year and that same rigorous clarity of vision – even when dealing with the complex or ambiguous – is just as evident here again. The experience of living simultaneously on the inside and outside of your own body is very particular to the female experience I think – and not only in relation to pregnancy but in myriad other ways too. I like the measured, unforgiving way she works her way through the logic, or illogic, of that. I find her work extraordinary.’ Annie Ernaux is ruthless. I mean that as a compliment. Perhaps no other memoirist — if, in fact, memoir-writing is what Ernaux is up to, which both is and isn’t the case — is so willing to interrogate not only the details of her life but also the slippery question of identity . ... Think of The Years ... as memoir in the shape of intervention: “all the things she has buried as shameful and which are now worthy of retrieval, unfolding, in the light of intelligence.”’

It was after late bloomer Levy was shortlisted for the Booker prize for Swimming Home, aged 52, that she began her three-volume series of “living autobiographies”. The first, 2013’s Things I Don’t Want To Know, takes George Orwell’s essay Why I Write as a jumping-off point for her reflections on life as a young female writer. The next two books, The Cost of Living and Real Estate, examine what it means to be an artist, a woman, a mother and a daughter, while asking questions about modernity, creative identity and personal freedom. Levy describes the series as “hopefully not being written at the end, with hindsight, but in the storm of life”. Bernstein, Richard (28 November 1999). " 'Darkness' a look at final illness". Tallahassee Democrat. p.2D. Archived from the original on 7 October 2022 . Retrieved 7 October 2022– via Newspapers.com. With The Years, Testard said Ernaux “invents a form, does something genuinely new with literature; it’s an intersection of the novel and autobiography and non-fiction”. a b Shaffi, Sarah (6 October 2022). "Annie Ernaux wins the 2022 Nobel prize in literature". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 6 October 2022 . Retrieved 7 October 2022. Born in Lillebonne, Normandy, in 1940, Ernaux sees herself as fundamentally a “child of war”, conscious from a young age of history with a capital H. Both the large-scale and finer textures of everyday life are of equal concern to her. “Maybe that’s why I’m so obsessed with the quest for a collective memory,” she suggests.Ernaux attributes the “I remember” concept that summons up an endless list of events and products, no matter how trivial, to the French writer Georges Perec, but it actually started with the American artist and poet Joe Brainard. Unlike their random lists, Ernaux’s are arranged chronologically, and so she becomes something more than a list-maker: a Greek chorus commenting on politics and lifestyle changes. And yet her recollections are evanescent, unstable, because the media have taken charge of memory and forgetting. And the media have divided people into generations: “We belonged to all and none. Our years were nowhere among them.” The media have become the gatekeepers of the imagination. She's very good on the mixing of the sexes, and how boys and girls, and then women and men, relate to each other, from childhood separation and differences to the fumblings of sex.