The Years: Annie Ernaux

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The White Review Books of the Year 2018| The Year in Literature: frieze | New Statesman Books of the Year 2020 Annie Ernaux receiving the 2022 Nobel prize in literature from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden. Photograph: Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images

The Yearsis a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions of 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 six decades.Annie Ernaux | The Booker Prizes". thebookerprizes.com. September 1940. Archived from the original on 6 October 2022 . Retrieved 6 October 2022.

Throughout The Years, first person singular is never used, even when the author is describing intimate events. Instead, Ernaux relies on a shifting flurry of pronouns: she, we, one. They blend and blur, sometimes within a single paragraph, to create a kind of intelligence or point of view that is universal and particular at once. (...) For Ernaux, photographs are central to the construction of her narrative -- as much for their illusions as for what they reveal. (...) It’s a brilliant strategy, not least because it encodes the notion of the collective, of the shared experience, into the marrow of the book." - David L. Ulin, The Los Angeles Times Nobel Winner Annie Ernaux Vows To 'Continue Fight Against Injustice' ". Barron's. AFP – Agence France Presse. 6 October 2022 . Retrieved 16 October 2022. A) powerful attempt to grasp history through "material" memory, and to describe the evolution of attitudes, events, and, as importantly, things. (...) In The Years she moves outwards towards a broader canvas, a longer and more collective viewpoint." - Margaret Drabble, New Statesmana house with a vine-covered arbour which was a hotel in the sixties, no. 90A, on the Zattere in Venice 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. This is an autobiography unlike any you have ever read. The Years is an earnest, fearless book, a Remembrance of Things Past for our age of media domination and consumerism, for our period of absolute commodity fetishism.’ 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.