The Years

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work

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 6 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.