Annie Ernaux

Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. 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 six 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."

The Years

Sarah Christine Gill

The last summer - everything was the 'last' - arrived. People gathered once more. They sped away to the clifs above the Channel, or flocked to public gardens in Paris to see the moon blot out the sun at noon. A chill descended, a kind of dusk. We were anxious for the sun's return but also yearned to linger in that peculiar darkness, the sensation of iving through the extinction of humanity in fast-forward. Millions of cosmic years passed before our eyes, shrouded in dark glasses. Blind faces raised to the sky seemed to await the coming ofa god or the pale rider of the Apocalypse. The sun reappeared and people clapped. There wouldn't be another solar eclipse until 2081, and we would be long gone. 

Over weeks and repetitions of the daily circuits, and Visits to the car parks, the sense of strangeness would fade. We would be amazed to find ourselves a part of this huge and nebulous population whose dim roar, rising from the motorways morning and night, seemed to imbue us with an invisible and powerful reality. We would discover Paris, locate its streets, arrondissements, and Métro stations, determine the best place on the platform to disembark and transfer to another train. At last we would dare to drive to the Place de l'Etoile and Concorde. At the entrance to the Gennevilliers bridge, where the immense vista ofParis suddenly opened up in front ofus, we would have the exalted sense of belonging to this huge and hectic life. It was a kind of individual promotion. We would no longer wish to return to what had become for us the undifferentiated 'provinces. And one evening, as our train plunged into a night studded with the bright red and blue neon signs of the Paris region, the Upper Savoie city we'd left three years before would seem like the ends of the earth.

Below the photo, written by hand: Lycée Jeanne-d'Arc - Rouen - Pbilosopby section, Class of 1958--1959. The names have not been inscribed, as though when the class president delivered the photos it had been unthinkable that any could be forgotten. Certainly, none of the girls could have imagined herself forty years later, an elderly woman looking at faces once so familiar and seeing only a triple row of ghosts with bright fixed gazes. 

We had time to desire things, plastic pencil cases, Crepe-soled shoes, gold watches. Their possession did not disappoint. We held them up to the admiration of others. They contained a mystery and magic that sur- vived their contemplation and handling. Turning them this way and that, we continued to expect something unfathomable.

Apart from the ballerina flats, nothing in the appearance of this teenage girl reflects what was all the rage that year or what was in the fashion magazines and the big-city shops, long plaid midi skirts, black jumpers, and chunky lockets, ponytails and a fringe like Audrey Hepburn's in Roman Holiday. The photo could easily date from the late forties or early sixties. For those born later it is simply old, and belongs to the prehistory of self, where all lives that precede one's own are levelled and disappear. Yet the beam that lights one side of the girl's face and the jumper, between the breasts, was for her a sensation of heat from the June sun of a year that no historian, or anyone else who lived at the time, could could mistake for any other than 1955. 

only like 5 pages in and i'm losing my mcfuckin mind..... jesus....

Patricia K

images in which we appeared as a little girl in the midst of beings who died before we were born, just as in our own memories our small children are there next to our parents and schoolmates. and one day we'll appear in our children's memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born. like sexual desire, memory never stops. it pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.

Clay Carey

reflexive, masterful, further evidence that all the conversation about late 20th century 21st century paris must be about postcolonial north/west african immigration, the refugee crisis, and the resultant far-right culturally protectionist white ethnonationalism. ernaux’s depiction of the algerian war went crazy. 

chris

the way this woman describes the passing of time is phenomenal

lily taggart

Wildly, wildly, excellent. Annie Ernaux is a genius. 

Ein beeindruckendes Buch über die Geschichte Frankreichs, allerdings ganz anders als (von mir) erwartet aufgebaut. Toll, dass auch Randgruppen wie z. B. Zugewanderte Platz finden. 

Belinda

Macht sprachlich wett was an Spannung fehlt. Manche Passagen sind eine Aneinanderreihung an Beschreibungen, die fast monoton wirken.

Julia Nessler

So schön wurde französische Geschichte noch nie beschrieben. Chapeau! 

Magdalena Berchtold

Sprachlich großartig. Ein Buch, das wie die eigene Erinnerung funktioniert, angereichert mit Zeitkritik und sus der Feder eines wachen Geistes

Alina Lindermuth

Zu monoton und trostlos. Hat mich nicht abgeholt und nicht begeistert. 

Lena Köninger

it's feels so personal yet so well researched. also interesting was the insights on the steady ebb and flow of french conservatism in ernaux's generation

Rachel O.

'I leaned against the beauty of the world and I held the smell of the seasons in my hands'

Felt so special to have read this memoir that draws you into a rich portrayal of life in France from 1941-2006, while in France.

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, THE YEARS is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, cultural habits, language, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising and news headlines. Annie Ernaux invents a form that is subjective and impersonal, private and collective, and a new genre - the collective autobiography - in order to capture the passing of time.

Fraser Simons

Absolutely incredible and singular. I really enjoyed consuming this and approaching it like a puzzle, essentially. The act of reading while asking yourself, ‘What is this?’ Is actually really exciting. It’s not often you engage with something new to form. Or it isn’t for me, anyway.

Neither memoir or fiction, Ernaux attempts a time capsule encapsulating herself, representing, well, the culture of the time. Through thousands of notes and retreading old memory and sensations, she bottles the scent of recollection. She isn’t the subject; if anything, time and culture seem to be, in so far as they can be. They collide and bleed into one another. In so doing, illustrating the cycle of history and plucking the trends of culture that come back into fashion and recede, like sediment on a beach with the tide coming in. 

It is fascinating that she uses the collective We for most things as well. Admitting a kind of complicity in the madness of crowds and sweeping energy of certain of notions taking everyone up, including her. Even if, at the time, she may not have thought and felt those things exactly, through the product of her memory, sifted through time, it appears that way regardless to her. That’s what happens when specificity cannot be obtained, I guess. There are the many small impressions and the inability to discern agency, so it is we and all of us. A collective responsibility that no one ever calls to account. 

The tide of culture and nations continue to sew trends, probably courting longer memories; institutional ones. Or perhaps subservient to them like any other person. It does seem like the older people get, it becomes a ‘had to be there moment’. Except these moments bare a pretty startling resemblance to some that are occurring right now. Everything old is new again. And we just can’t seem to erect a structure that benefits from the collective intellect. Like a newborn, and their subsequent milestones, the collective memory is erased to make use of, or more likely, to protect itself from those ever damaging tides.

Laura Leila Marta

mariola

weli 

Diane Wang

Celestine Taevs-Nakaya

Jessica Ullström

anna g

*Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize* 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 Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work, The Years was a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008, and is considered in French Studies departments in the US as a contemporary classic. 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 six 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."

The Years

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