Brevity and the genere-less text
Liz Tascio The Years, by Annie Ernaux Seven Stories Press, 2017. When the Nobel committee called Annie Ernaux to inform her she had won the prize for literature in 2022, she saw the Swedish number and did not pick up her phone. She assumed it was a prank, because friends had pranked her before, just like this. All of France knew her work—she’d been publishing for five decades—and had considered her a contender for the Nobel for years. Still, you and I can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing of her at all until last year, when we (and she) first heard her name on the news: Annie Ernaux had won the Nobel, in no small part due to The Years, a memoir she first published in France in 2008. Annie who? asked a vast section of the English-language-reading public. And didn’t Virginia Woolf write The Years? So, first, a quick primer: Annie Ernaux was born in 1940 in Normandy; her parents pulled themselves out of grindingly hard factory jobs to run a café and grocery. Ernaux knew very early she wanted to be a writer, and she kept detailed diaries from a young age. She moved to London at age 20 as an au pair, and she pursued her education upon her return to France, becoming a teacher and finishing a degree in modern literature. Her first book was published in 1974, titled Les Armoires Vides, literally “empty cabinets”—it is an autobiographical novel of Ernaux’s