Years, The - Softcover

Annie Ernaux; Alison Strayer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609807871 ISBN 13: 9781609807870

Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2018

Synopsis

The Years, by bestselling French author Annie Ernaux, 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.

About this title

Review:

"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

"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 caseis 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

..".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

About the Author:

Born in 1940, ANNIE ERNAUX grew up in Normandy, studied at Rouen University, and began teaching high school. From 1977 to 2000, she was a professor at the Centre National d'Enseignement par Correspondance. One of France's most esteemed living writers, her books have been subject to much critical acclaim. She is the 2017 winner of the Margeurite Yourcenar Prize for her body of work. She won the prestigious Prix Renaudot for A Man's Place when it was first published in French in 1984. The English edition was a New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. The English edition of A Woman's Story was a New York Times Notable Book.

ALISON STRAYER is a Canadian writer and translator Her work has been shortlisted for the Governor General's Award for Literature and for Translation, the Grand Prix du livre de Montreal, and the Prix litteraire France-Quebec. She lives in Paris.

About this edition

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1609807871
• ISBN 13: 9781609807870
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256