Unlike the bed-hopping antics of her contemporary Catherine Millet, for example, who made a scandalous impression in France with her 2001 account of an anonymous “mass” of sexual partners, The Sexual Life of Catherine M , sexuality in Ernaux’s books has a devotional charge, and, like her writing is more powerful when concentrated and distilled. Yet as she travels to Athens, in Outline, then wanders through London, in Transit, and negotiates the hot streets of an unnamed European city in the final volume, Kudos, we come to know her and the times she is living in through the stories she relays about others. Perhaps no other memoirist — if, in fact, memoir-writing is what Ernaux is up to, which both is and isn’t the case — is so willing to interrogate not only the details of her life but also the slippery question of identity . Personal memory yields to that of the collective to “capture the lived dimension of History,” but her brilliance is to relinquish neither humour nor sense of scale. And one day we’ll appear in our children’s memories, among their grandchildren and people not yet born.

And so it is throughout her story -- which is a story of how memory shifts and fades, the significance of past events weakening even as some remain bright and vivid in our minds, and sometimes the unexpected and/or seemingly incidental making the longest-lasting impression.It’s a stance perhaps in conflict with her otherwise strong public posture of sharing and open-source creation (Ernaux doesn’t believe she “owns” her texts and views her Nobel win as a collective effort).

That interest, however, is short-lived as she realizes what little impact the protests were in 1968. Much like her books, which have forged a new literary genre of folding subjective memories and observations into a shared sense of French history, Ernaux prefers to exist within a crowd: to be just one among many. Celle du temps qui passe avec ses sensations, ses souvenirs, ses joies, ses oublis et son désir farouche de sauver. It was after late bloomer Levy was shortlisted for the Booker prize for Swimming Home, aged 52, that she began her three-volume series of “living autobiographies”. She marvels at how quickly people have learned to use the mobile phone, computer, iPod and GPS — and she is unable to imagine the devices we’ll be using in 10 years’ time.

She is “haunted by the girl of ’58”, and fears that she’ll die before she gets the story on to the page. Ernaux presents the work largely in short sections, many only a paragraph long, summarizing times, periods, events, a rapid flow (rather than simply rapid-fire) chronological progression from the Second World War (Ernaux was born in 1940) to the near-present. But it is not a straightforward autobiography; rather it is told in a choral “we”, which sometimes shifts into the third person, so the author appears as “she”. Reading it reminds me of Natalia Ginzburg’s writing about objects, or Maeve Brennan’s encounters with public spaces in New York.

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers.In terms of prose style, however, Ernaux has little in common with the more flamboyant Proust – her writing is more austere, the sensuality more analytical. She rings Ernaux’s tones through her own exact idioms so the eighties anti-racism slogan Touche pas à mon pote!

Throughout “The Years,” Ernaux traces the collapse of Catholic prudishness as it’s attacked by secularism, the pill, the legalization of abortion and the women’s movement. They blend and blur, sometimes within a single paragraph, to create a kind of intelligence or point of view that is universal and particular at once.

For Ernaux, photographs are central to the construction of her narrative -- as much for their illusions as for what they reveal.