A review by frogwithlittlehammer
The Years by Annie Ernaux

informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

One of those books that is an experience of purity washing over you. To live is to choose either Proust’s madeleine or to distinguish between “palimpsest sensations”. To live is to slowly become dispossessed. But to live is to also be in the unchanged body you’ve had since you were 16, to acknowledge you have more than what your parents ever had but still want to rid yourself of things and others, to blur faces from the past as equally as it happens in the present. Writing a memoir seems like one of the scariest things to do in living honestly, and the way Ernaux managed it in the je collectif was just stunning. Duh that this won the Nobel prize. Currently on one with unflinching and elucidating stories from women that are too cool to need to actually explicitly state anything about their ontology, and that’s where they get you.