The Years: Annie Ernaux

Product Information

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

We discovered the nouveau roman of Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, and Sarraute, which we wanted to like, but it didn't offer us enough help with out lives. The Nobel prize in literature has been awarded to Annie Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory”. Over time, Ernaux becomes disillusioned with her marriage and wonders what would happen if she left her husband and children — something she ultimately decides to do. After her divorce, Ernaux's life becomes much more solitary. At the same time, France begins to descend into recession and sees right-wing politicians take power. The Years, Written by Annie Ernaux". The Booker Prize Foundation. 20 June 2018. Archived from the original on 6 October 2022 . Retrieved 7 October 2022. And with their rise to power, a picture of Ernaux again appears — this time with a cat. The woman, who had been a lifelong journaler then decides to write a memoir which she thinks she wants to write in the third person (a lot like The Years). At the same time, Ernaux's children have grown and now visit her with their spouses, which makes her feel even older than she is.the newborn flailed in the air like a skinned rabbit in the delivery room of the Clinique Caudéran Pasteur, found again half an hour later, dressed and sleeping on his side in a little bed, one hand out, and the sheet pulled up to his shoulders 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.

Ernaux’s work was first published in English by Seven Stories Press in the US, which was founded in 1995 by Dan Simon. The press is named for the seven authors Simon first published at Seven Stories Press; among them was Ernaux.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. Ernaux supported Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the 2012 French presidential election. [34] In 2018, Ernaux expressed her support for the yellow vests protests. [35] The book isn’t overtly feminist in the sense that the narrator is described as such. But, it does detail the arrival of the sexual revolution in the 1960s, how difficult it was to get access to safe and legal abortions, and the narrator leaves her husband at a time when divorce wasn’t the norm. Later in her life, she takes a much younger lover and allows herself to be an independent person, separate from her ex-husband and her children.