Another masterpiece of remembering from Annie Ernaux, the Man Booker International Prize-shortlisted author of The Years. In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits the season fifty years earlier when she found herself overpowered by another's will and desire. In the summer of 1958, eighteen-year-old Ernaux submits her will to a man's, and then he moves on, leaving her without a "master," bereft. Now, fifty years later, she realizes she can obliterate the intervening years and return to consider this young woman that she wanted to forget completely. And to discover that here, submerged in shame... View More...
A New York Times Notable Book Annie Ernaux's father died exactly two months after she passed her practical examination for a teaching certificate. Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a gr... View More...
*Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize*Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in NonfictionWinner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of workWinner 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--... View More...
*Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize*Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in NonfictionWinner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of workWinner 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--... View More...
"Annie Ernaux's work," wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York Times, "represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory." In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison concurred: "Keen language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to reveal pulses of love, desire, remorse." In this "journal" Ernaux turns her penetrating focus on those points in life where the everyday and the extraordinary intersect, where "things seen" reflect a private life meeting the larger world. From the war crimes tribunal in Bosni... View More...
