Annie Ernaux

The Years
A genre-bending collective autobiography by Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux
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Jeanine Nault““During that summer of 1980, her youth seems to her an endles light-filled space whose every corner she occupies. She embraces it whole with the eyes of the present and discerns nothing specific. That this world is now behind her is a shock. This year, for the first time, she seized the terrible meaning of the phrase ‘I have only one life.’ Perhaps she already sees herself as the old woman in Cria cuervos, the film that shattered her one earlier summer, already so remote, surreal with heat, the summer of the ‘drought.’ Paralyzed and mute, her face covered in tears, the woman gazes at photos on the wall while the same songs play over and over again. The films she wants to see and the ones she's recently seen form story lines inside her and she seeks her own life therein— Wanda, A Simple Story. She asks them to draw her a future. She feel as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.” Left me speechless and feeling so alive—what the best art does to me.”
Matthew Chrisler











