****WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
**
Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize
**
Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's 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 present--even
projections into the future--photos, 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 author's 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."
Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in
Nonfiction
Winner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of
work
Winner of the 2016 Strega European Prize
