Abstract
Annie Ernaux has been the subject of considerable attention in the Brazilian publishing landscape, especially after her 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature and the recent translations of five of her books published by Fósforo. In this essay, I intend to explore the apparently contradictory place that fiction occupies in her work: in a series of interviews (ERNAUX, 2011), Ernaux argues that her literary production involves, at the same time, the incorporation and the questioning of the fictional. To flesh out my argument, I will examine two long excerpts from The Years (2008), proposing a dialogue with Wolfgang Iser, Ivan Jablonka, Luiz Costa Lima, and Pierre Bourdieu. My goal will be to show that the project of a sentence "full of real things" cannot be detached from a certain fictional elaboration; after all, it is the perspectivation through fiction that allows putting life and facts in parentheses in order to better approach them and better think of them.
Keywords:
Annie Ernaux; The years; fiction; subject; contemporary French literature