The Years: Annie Ernaux

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In the course of years Ernaux grows up and out of her small village, attends university and then suddenly has a husband.

Reading it reminds me of Natalia Ginzburg’s writing about objects, or Maeve Brennan’s encounters with public spaces in New York. But because everything, no matter how obscure or distant, is now available on the internet, we inhabit “the infinite present. 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.Knausgaard’s six-volume series of autobiographical novels, My Struggle, made him a global phenomenon when they were published between 2009 and 2011.

A) powerful attempt to grasp history through "material" memory, and to describe the evolution of attitudes, events, and, as importantly, things. She rings Ernaux’s tones through her own exact idioms so the eighties anti-racism slogan Touche pas à mon pote! Ernaux takes lovers and glides into the independence which almost by accident she missed as a young woman. She has also won the Prix Renaudot for A Man's Placeand the Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work.Later in her life, she takes a much younger lover and allows herself to be an independent person, separate from her ex-husband and her children. It is the kind of book you close after reading a few pages, carried away by the bittersweet taste it leaves in your mind. Ernaux’s typical response to such naysayers has been to point out that literary length is not an indicator of literary labour: “My books are so short because I spend a long time writing them,” she has said. Ernaux certainly isn’t a Marxist, but at the same time she sees history as sociological and the economy as determinative.

While Ernaux at the time is discouraged by her inability to express beyond “stereotypes and commonplace words the full reach of a woman’s experience between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four,” in its telling this video recording becomes a specific moment reading backwards and forwards in time, speaking as much of the France of the past as implying what is to come –for her, for the girls. As a reader, shocks of recognition are potent: the young girl’s sense of “the undeniable weight of truth” because something is written in a book, the sudden waking realisation of being caught in a particular type of life, projects falling by the wayside to be later revived, difficult unfamiliar new technologies and the romance of having a lover’s writing peel out of a fax machine, the indescribable feeling of “simultaneous stagnation and mutation” in the midst of social crisis. Ernaux comes to despise Christmas, “the most grueling period of desire and hatred of things, the peak of the consumer year.Ernaux said in an interview she was "absolutely in favour of women revolting against this absolute constraint". Here are the sevenaward-winning titles from our Women in Translation series, all at 35% off through August 8th.

The Years is a narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present, photos, books, songs, radio, television, advertising, and news headlines.We discovered the nouveau roman of Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Sollers, and Sarraute, which we wanted to like, but it didn't offer us enough help with out lives.