Dare to rescue

Opinions differ about Annie Ernaux. Some consider the 83-year-old Frenchwoman, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2022, to be a gifted chronicler of her time. In what is probably her best-known work, “The Years”, she tells no less than the biography of an entire generation of women, and in such an omniscient tone that it almost has something biblical. As if they were prophecies about the past. Others find her prose self-referential and banal, although this criticism is of course often based on a certain misogyny, which already places less value on the lives and everyday experiences of women.