Les années
First published 2001
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About this book
"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
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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."" --
Source: Open Library
Book information
- Author
- Annie Ernaux
- First published
- 2001
- Edition
- De jaren
- Publisher
- De Arbeiderspers
- Language
- DUT
- ISBN-13
- 9789029540650