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description: WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATUREConsidered by many to be the iconic French memoirists defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008.The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory impressions past and presenteven projections into the futurephotos books songs radio television and decades of advertising headlines contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries.Local dialect words of the times slogans brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the authors continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself inexorable narrates its own course consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges at once subjective and impersonal private and collective.On its 2008 publication in France The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved bestselling and award-winning author The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir written by entire generations and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers the narrator eschews the I for the we (or they or one) as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents generation (and could be writing of her own book): From a common fund of hunger and fear everything was told in the we and impersonal pronouns.
language: English
title: The Years
publisher: Seven Stories Press