Years

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.

Review: \”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.\” -Edmund White, New York Times Book Review \”Annie Ernaux is ruthless. I mean that as a compliment. Perhaps no other memoirist — if, in fact, memoir-writing is what Ernaux is up to, which both is and isn’t the case — is so willing to interrogate not only the details of her life but also the slippery question of identity. …Think of The Years…as memoir in the shape of intervention: ‘all the things she has buried as shameful and which are now worthy of retrieval, unfolding, in the light of intelligence.’\” -David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times \”The process of reading The Years is similar to a treasure box discovery. …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 transforms her life into history and her memories into the collective memory of a generation.\” -Los Angeles Review of Books \”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 \”…a memoir that is humble and generous, an homage to the great French writers and thinkers of the previous century. The \”she\” of The Years could be (and indeed is meant to be) any woman who grew up in a small town and moved into the literary world… To her, the book will \”give form to her future absence.\” The Years is not the testimony of a woman who once existed, but of a woman who no longer exists.\” -Bookforum \”The author of one of the most important oeuvres in French literature, Annie Ernaux’s work is as powerful as it is devastating, as subtle as it is seething.\” — Edouard Louis, author of The End of Eddy \”I admire the form she invented, mixing autobiography, history, sociology. The anxious interrogations on her defection, moving as she did from the dominated to the dominant classes. Her loyalty to her people, her fidelity to herself. The progressive depersonalisation of her work, culminating in the disappearance of the ‘I’ in The Years, a book I must have read three or four times since its publication, even more impressed each time by its precision, its sweep and–I can’t think of any other word–its majesty. One of the few indisputably great books of contemporary literature.\” — Emmanuel Carr re, author of The Kingdom \”One of the best books you’ll ever read.\” — Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk \”Attentive, communal and genuinely new, Annie Ernaux’s The Years is an astonishing achievement.\” — Olivia Laing, author of Crudo \”A book of memory, of a life and world, staggeringly and brilliantly original.\” — Philippe Sands, author of East West Street \”Ravishing and almost oracular with insight, Ernaux’s prose performs an extraordinary dance between collective and intimate, ‘big’ history and private experience. The Years is a philosophical meditation paced as a rollercoaster ride through the decades. How we spend ourselves too quickly, how we reach for meaning but evade it, how to live, how to remember–these are Ernaux’s themes. I am desperate for more.\” — Kapka Kassabova, author of Border \”The Years is a revolution, not only in the art of autobiography but in art itself. Annie Ernaux’s book blends memories, dreams, facts and meditations into a unique evocation of the times in which we lived, and live.\” — John Banville

Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Imprint: Seven Stories US
Publication date: 15/11/2017