“This is a notebook full of sorrow, with a few glimmers of wild delight,” Annie Ernaux has said of *Getting Lost,* her most recent book.

French Dispatch

Inside the life and work of Annie Ernaux, the French writer who won this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature

By Claire Lowdon

Reading for this review was my first encounter with Annie Ernaux, the celebrated French memoirist now in her eighties. She has long been a literary sensation in France. When Simple Passion, her account of an affair with a younger man, was published in 1991, it sold 200,000 copies in two months. Now English-speaking readers are catching on, alerted by her International Booker prize short-listing for The Years in 2019.

What a pleasure to discover her startlingly original oeuvre. The Years (published in France as Les Années in 2008) is a fine place to start. It is a memoir unlike any other, beginning in 1940, when Ernaux was born, and finishing around 2006. The focus is not on the author but the years she lived through: changing cultural obsessions, values, technologies. Told largely in the first person plural, it is like one of those long Chinese paintings, a grand, frieze-like scroll with regular glimpses of the author’s tiny figure in the crowd.