The Years: Annie Ernaux

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a b c Joffre, Tzvi (6 October 2022). "New Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux's repeatedly supported BDS". The Jerusalem Post. Archived from the original on 7 October 2022 . Retrieved 8 October 2022.

There's a photo-album-feel to the book, with Ernaux even referring to numerous photographs in the text -- but tellingly not reproducing them, merely describing them, in some detail: this, too, is how the work as a whole comes across: not descriptions of the events etc. per se, but rather of the memory of them that lingers, the pictures no longer in front of us but still vivid -- or blurred -- in the mind's eye. This will not be a work of remembrance in the usual sense, aimed at putting a life into story, creating an explanation of self. Things Seen. Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky. University of Nebraska Press. 2010. ISBN 978-0803228153.

Ernaux presents the work largely in short sections, many only a paragraph long, summarizing times, periods, events, a rapid flow (rather than simply rapid-fire) chronological progression from the Second World War (Ernaux was born in 1940) to the near-present. The White Review Books of the Year 2018| The Year in Literature: frieze | New Statesman Books of the Year 2020 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. Change happens so imperceptibly that only big events like the collapse of the Berlin Wall or 9/11 allow us to establish a “before” and an “after.” Closer to home, photographs set a time line, as do family holidays, and both are used as markers throughout the book. But because everything, no matter how obscure or distant, is now available on the internet, we inhabit “the infinite present.”

Leménager, Grégoire (15 December 2011). "Annie Ernaux: 'Je voulais venger ma race' ". L'Obs (in French). Archived from the original on 29 January 2022 . Retrieved 18 April 2019. La Femme gelée, Paris: Gallimard, 1981; French & European Publications, Incorporated, 1987, ISBN 978-0-7859-2535-4 Nobel Prize in Literature 2022: Annie Ernaux, bearing witness to women's experiences and memory". The Indian Express. 7 October 2022. Archived from the original on 7 October 2022 . Retrieved 7 October 2022. Cassivi, Marc (24 May 2022). "Les années filmées d'Annie Ernaux". La Presse. Archived from the original on 6 October 2022 . Retrieved 6 October 2022. The personal is kept at some distance through the use of that " je collectif", the fumblings of sex, marriage and motherhood treated largely as a common rather than purely personal experience.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. Annie Thérèse Blanche Ernaux ( née Duchesne; born 1 September 1940) is a French writer who was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory". [1] [2] Her literary work, mostly autobiographical, maintains close links with sociology. [3] Early life and education [ edit ] But, again, the book isn’t really about the narrator. It’s about us, the “we,” and our collective experience. And it feels nice to know that we’re not alone. The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux’s work is as powerful as it isdevastating, as subtle as it is seething.” —Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy

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”. Now, I will preface this review by saying that my one regret is that I didn’t read The Years in its original French. The English version was a lot easier on my work-exhausted brain so that was helpful, but there were certain passages (and honestly, it was beautifully translated by Alison L. Strayer) that I would have preferred to read in the original text. The moral of the story is that if you can, always read the original. But, love you Yas for the great book gift. of Molly Bloom, who lies next to her husband, remembering the first time a boy kissed her and she said yes yes yes Annie Ernaux’s The Years,translated by Alison L. Strayer, is ostensibly the author’s autobiography, but if a book can be both sinuous and fragmentary, this one is, circling around the truth, presenting a collage of images, episodes, memories and flights of imagination. The narrative voice moves between the first person plural and the third person. It’s just a glorious novel – think JM Coetzee meets Joan Didion.” —Alex Preston, The Guardian For once, the rumours have proved true. Annie Ernaux, the 82-year-old French writer, who for the last couple of years has been touted as a favourite, has been announced as the winner of the 2022 Nobel prize for literature – only the 17th woman out 119 laureates in the award’s history.She notes the post-war shifts in attitudes -- towards the past, towards technology and consumerism ("More than ever people relied upon the acquisition of things to build better lives"), towards sex (beautifully describing the legalization of the pill, and the lingering awe and fear, all around, of what it embodied -- and how: "We strongly sensed that with the pill, life would never be the same again"). Schwartz, Madeleine (13 April 2020). "A Memoirist Who Mistrusts Her Own Memories". The New Yorker . Retrieved 8 August 2023.