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Patrick Modiano (b. 1945) |
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French
novelist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2014 "for
the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human
destinies . . . " In
his work, Patrick Modiano has mixed historical reality and fiction. A
recurring subject in his early books is the period of the Nazi
Occupation. "I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop; the shower had started when Hutte left me." (from Missing Person by Patrick Modiano, translated by Daniel Weissbort, 1980, p. 7; original title Rue des boutiques obscures, 1978) Patrick
Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, a suburb of Paris. His
father, Albert Modiano, was a Italian Jewish businessman. During the dark years of the
German occupation of France, he
was forced into black-market and possibly Gestapo-linked activities in
order to survive as a Jew. He never spoke of his
wartime activities. Modiano's Belgian-born mother Luisa Colpeyn
Modiano (b. 1918) worked as a chorus girl, cinema translator and
actress: she had roles in
many TV series and acted in such films as Le cercle vicieux (1960, Vicious
Circle) by Max Pécas, Bande à part
(1964, Band of Outsiders) by Jean-Luc Godard, and La mort en sautoir (1980) by Pierre
Goutas. Modiano learned Flemish, his first language, from his
grandparents, who brought him up. After unhappy years at a boarding
school, he attended the prestigious Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, where his
geometry teacher was the writer Raymond Queneau, a friend of his
mother. Not wanting to go back to school after a weekend, Modiano mentions in Souvenirs dormants (2017, Sleep of Memory) suffering from the Sunday fear syndrome. Certain people made him afraid of falling. Much of his time Modiano spent in cafés and browsing in
second-hand bookshops. Fascinated by esoteric subjects, he read G. I. Gurdjieff's autobiographical work Meetings with Remarkable Men. "Today,
fifty years later, that title and the word "meetings" make me think of
something that had never occurred to me: Unlike many people my age, I
never tried to meet the four of five intellectual guides who dominated
university life in those days, or become their disciple." (Sleep of Memory, translated by Mark Polizzotti, 2018, p. 32) Modiano has said that he was only really happy when
he walked on the streets of the Pigalle district. "... nowadays Paris
is rather aseptic and everything has become more uniform," he once
regretted in an interview. Together with his friend, Hughes de
Courson, he made songs, Modiano wrote the lyrics and Courson composed
the melodies. Francoise Hardy recorded in 1968 the ragtime piece
'Étonnez-moi, Benoît' (in Comment te dire Adieu). Also Myriam Anissimov performed some of their songs. Queneau encouraged Modiano in his literary pursuits and
introduced him to artistic circles. Modiano started writing seriously
in 1967. His first novel, La Place
de l'Étoile,
was published by Gallimard. It came out after the French student riots
in May 1968, but had nothing to do
with the current political crisis. The story consisted of fractured,
hallucinatory memoirs of Raphaël
Schlemilovitch, a Jew, struggling to gain a sense of himself. The first foreign language into which the book was translated was Swedish. In a interview Modiano has said that the death of his brother Rudy in 1957 was the most traumatic event of his childhood and the most identifiable reason why he became a writer. From 1968 to 1982, he dedicated his books to Rudy. Modiano's father largely abandoned his family and died in the late 1970s. The "missing father" and a search for personal identity and have been central to Modiano's work. He also was neglected by his mother, who did not show much maternal affection toward her son. In De si braves garçons (1982) and La Petite Bijou (2001) Modiano portrayed negligent mothers. He once said, that he has felt as if he were writing the same book over and over again. Most likely, his father read La Place de l'Étoile. In the same year, when it was published, he disappeared. Nothing was heard of him until 1978. Many of Modiano's novels play with autobiographical truth and
fictionalization of self. Les
boulevards de ceinture
(1972, Ring Roads), which won the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman,
told about a young Jewish boy, who searches for his missing father and
discovers the criminal underworld in wartime Paris. The beginning of
the novel leans on the nouveau
roman and Alain Robbe-Grillet
(1922-2008) by
focusing on the description of physical objects. Remise de peine (1988), Fleurs de ruine (1991), and Chien de printemps (1993), published by Seuil, form a sort informal autobiography. The narrator in Remise de peine is called Patoche as a child, and Patrick in adulthood. Most times, Modiano's novels can easily be read with a map of Paris in hand; names of the places are authentic and real. But not always. As a reminder that the line between fiction and nonfiction can be blurry, Modiano gives a non-existent address in Remise de peine: rue du Docteur-Dordaine, the name of the street on which Patoche lived with his brother. In Livret de famille (1977) the street is called la rue du Docteur-Kurzenne. Modiano himself has an apartment near the Luxembourg Garden. Villa triste (1975)
explored the difficulties of remembering.
The unnamed narrator tries to recreate some fifteen years later a
summer in a resort town near Lake Geneva, where he has escaped from the
Algerian bombings in Paris. In 1976 Modiano published a
book-length interview with Emmanuel Berl, a journalist, historian and
essayist, and neighbor, in the Palais Royal, of Jean Cocteau and
Colette. Livret de famille
(1977)
echoed the experiences of the writer's own life without being
autobiographical. The narrator is anonymous. "One cannot presume to
say," wrote Francis Steegmuller in his review, "that Patrick Modiano
has deliberately set out to make himself, in his books, a man of
mystery . . ." With the film director Louis Malle Modiano wrote the
screenplay
for Lacombe Lucien (1974),
about a young Frenchman, who joins the Gestapo and becomes the victiom
of his own detachment and indiffence. This controversial film, which
deconstructed the myths of the Occupation by portraying Lucien in a
fundamentally sympathetic light, was accused of reactionary politics
and aestetics. Modiano established his literary reputation with his early novels. Published when the golden age of roman nouveau was over, they were seen as a sign of the future. Some critics have contrasted Modiano with another famous French writer of his generation, J.M.G. Le Clézio. They both have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, but while Le Clézio has been counted among the avant-garde writers due to his early experimentalist approach to novel, Modiano is thought to be more tradition-oriented due to his popularity. His books are thin and deceptively easy to read, but contain depths and meanings which may not be immediately obvious. Ever since his breakthrough
on the French literary scene Modiano has enjoyed success among both the
public and the critics. His outstanding career as a
writer has spanned over four decades. One of his most discussed books in the 1990s was
Dora Bruder (1997). More
of a biography with autobiographical elements than a novel, it told
about a Jewish girl, who was
deported in 1942 from Paris to Auschwitz. Originally to book was
published in the Gallimard Blanche series, before it was reprinted in
the Folio paperback edition, to which Modiano made alterations. "Dora Bruder [will] forever open out into alternative stories, and thereby ultimately foreground the possible rather than the known." (''Avec Klarsfeld, contre l’oubli': Patrick Modiano's Dora Bruder' by Alan Morris, Journal of European Studies, 36(3), 2006, p. 277) A
street in the 18th Arrondissement in Paris, the Promenade, has been
named after Dora Bruder. Modiano tells at the beginning of the novel
that he was familiar with the area – he would accompany his mother to
the Saint-Ouen flea markets as a child. Although Modiano's work resist simple categorization, his name
is generally associated with postmodernism. In
spite of winning the major French literary prizes, honors,
translations, and studies, Modiano has remained largely aloof from the
public arena. However, he has appeared in 1982 on Bernard Pivot's talk show Apostrophes, made a cameo role in
Raoul Ruiz's film Généalogie d'un
crime (1997) as Catherine Deneuve's ex-husband Bob, and participated as a member of the jury at Cannes
film festival in 2000. Modiano married in 1970 Dominique
Zehrfuss, writer and illustrator; they had two
daughters, Zina and Marie. Modiano allowed them to play in the same
room while he was working. Marie, who is a writer too, is married to a
Swedish musician. Modiano's reader must abandon all expectation regarding answers to the mysteries of his books, of which Chevreuse (2021, Scene of the Crime) is one example among many others. Nathalie Sarraute
(1900-1999), who pioneered the New Novel movement,
said in 1997 at the age of ninety-seven, that Modiano was one of the
young writers whom she most admired. For further reading: 'Modiano, Patrick,' in World Authors 1975-1980, edited by Vineta Colby (1985); Patrick Modiano: pièces d'identité by Colin Nettlebeck and Penelope Hueston (1986); 'Collaboration, Alienation, and the Crisis of Identity in the Film and Fiction of Patrick Modiano' by Richard J. Golsan, in Film and Literature: A Comparative Approach to Adaptation, ed. by Wendell Aycock and Michael Schoenecke (1988); Patrick Modiano, edited by Jules Bedner (1993); Patrick Modiano by Alan Morris (1996); Paradigms of Memory. The Occupation and Other Hi/stories in the Novels of Patrick Modiano, edited by Martine Guyot-Bender and William VanderWolk (1998); A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano's Postmodern Fictions by Akane Kawakami (2001); A Riffaterrean Reading of Patrick Modiano's La Place de L'étoile by Charles O'Keefe (2005); Patrick Modiano, edited by John E. Flower (2007); Patrick Modiano by Akane Kawakami (revised and expanded version, 2015); Isotopias: Places and Spaces in French War Fiction of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries by Peter D. Tame (2015); Paris dans les pas de Patrick Modiano by Gilles Schlesser (2019); Poétique de la répétition chez Patrick Modiano: style, symptômes, vestiges by Didier Saillier (2021) Selected works:
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