*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."
