The Years

I read this after she won the Nobel Prize, out of curiosity and a sense of obligation. All you readers out there, don’t wait! I typically highlight passages in a book that are especially insightful, well-written, or meaningful to me personally, but I gave up when page after page was solid blue.I am 76, so her thoughts on aging and the passage of time resonated with me perhaps more than they would with younger readers.

Brilliant writing delivers an autobiography that reflects the shifts in social context from the end of the Second World War to the 80s in France. Wonderful. The writer never abandons her working class past. Read it!

This is chronicled compilation of images that merge into political, social, familial, aesthetic, and intellectual events. The author claims not to pursue self-discovery—but experience a journey from adolescence to older age. Apart from numerous references to French politics, there is tremendous reward is journeying through her life and insights, which become more universal as the book progresses. However, not sure if a male reader would connect as fully.

This memoir covers the years 1941 to 2007, and is written by a Parisian novelist. Although as an American a lot of cultural references were lost on me, I lived through many of these years and was fascinated by the French perspective of well-known events. Francophiles will love this even more. The writing is clean and evocative.

This was a book club selection for a bilingual (French & English) online group. I found it very long and tedious, and I had to force myself to continue to read it. It honestly just felt like a list of memories / historic events or markets with very little deal engaging story. This is not a book I would have read had it not been a book club selection. I neither enjoyed it not would recommend it.

Very innovative in approaching the structure of a fictional/autobiographical novel. Might not please those who are much younger.

Great read

I tried to take myself into this memoir but found it tedious and depressing. I realize that life was very difficult in the war years in France. Yet I did not find myself wanting to live it. Perhaps, I find myself with fewer days to devote to reading and just didn't want to be a part of her life.

Formally experimental - though never inaccessible, even hypnotically compelling - this is the result of Ernaux's grappling with how to represent textually the experience of living through time. As such, it continues a long tradition of writing subjectivity and I'd certainly see this as in dialogue with e.g. Virginia Woolf, Proust (both name-checked in the text) as well as the later Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk. Ernaux is self-conscious of her status as a woman, citing de Beauvoir as well as other feminist thinkers; and is equally self-aware of her lower-class French provincial birth and upbringing.The narrative stretches from Ernaux's birth year, 1940, to 2008 and the telling is via a collage of 'moments' taken from everything from film posters, political slogans, best-selling books and key events, to two stories, one told in a 'we' voice ('on' in French but translated consistently as 'we' in English to keep the tone correct), and one via a third-person 'she' - the latter, disruptively, the most intimate. The inner and outer lives are thus represented from the big events that a generation experiences (May 1968, 9/11) to the atomised life of an individual - though I was constantly questioning to what extent even the 'individual' was, to some extent, a kind of 'female destiny' story told frequently through the body: first period, pregnancy scares, abortion, menopause etc.For me, Ernaux is my find of the year - and someone whose books I'd recommend if you love Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and intellectual foremothers such as Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir.

I really enjoyed the clever way that this book was written, it's honesty and clarity, especially the early years. I also liked its hints about the writing process.However the subject matter of the reminiscences contained just too much French politics for a British reader, and gradually it also became a cliched account of news items from the sixties onwards. Was her life influenced so much by international events? Or was this inevitable, to link with a wide audience.

We lived through all this, and now we face death. Yet Amazon demands 7 more words. Leave us in peace!

This book is about my era and so the passage through the post war years up to now was familiar, even though I have little experience of France. I think that someone in their 60s, who knows a lot more about France than I do, would be fascinated. I love the style of the writing although I would be hard pressed to explain what it is.

Especially liked how it conflates the personal with the public and historical.