Noble Prize winner, Patrick Modiano, SUSPENDED SENTENCES
A friend gave me this Noble Prize winning author's book, which contains three novellas for Christmas. In our post Christmas New Year's conversation, she told me she and her mother had read the last of the novellas over the Christmas holiday. So I commenced to join them and found the words hypnotic, requiring me to continue reading these 3 and 5 page chapters, nearly finishing, or perhaps finishing in one day's reading. Modiani's novella has to be read slowly, savoring phrases that linger in the mind. He is concerned, in a dream like manner, with loss, with lost people, with people who have lost their identities, or have hidden themselves, or assumed other identities. In other words, with characters who are different than they seem. I felt he was preoccupied with collaborists with the Nazis when Germany occupied France, and that had probably earned him the Noble Prize as it is not a part of history treated often. I might have surmised that he was Jewish, but my thinking had not gone that far...Proust came to mind, as Modiano is concerned with time, and time 's duration, and movement, and memory's recollection in instances, and a way of reeling back through experience, wanting to play it again, to capture what was lost... to create another ending. I also felt the nuance, due to the translation, which is regarded as very fine, is still lost, when not read in the original French.
Then, I searched for the NYRB review, written by Anka Muhlstein, and found I had been pretty much on target... in my review in a letter to a friend who felt I had been ambiguous in my response to the book. I wanted to verify that I had gotten it right, that I had read him correctly...or his words, that is. In the review he is praised for being and author "with a virtuoso's command of language, equally at ease with the simple and the complex, the precise and the evocative," He is cited as often using the descriptive word, "bizarre". He has written more than 30 novels, all on the same theme of the cruelty of the occupation of the Germans in France. "Sordid arrangements bring together Jews on the run, secrete collaborators, crooks, Gestapo agents, impostors and victims...none of the characters turn out to be what he or she seems to be at first and that gives these stories the allure of film noir, where the rising tension reels in the reader." The novel about an amnesiac detective who has to find how who he is, it won the Goncourt Prize in 1978 and the Prix des Detectives. Dora Bruder is one of his most intriguing novels as it is about a girl found dead on a list whose parents ran an ad in the paper searching for her. She , among 80,000 others had ended up in one of the camps where she died.
So, I am taking the right approach as a reader to his writing and vision, and look forward now to reading the other two novellas. "Afterimage" and "Suspended Sentences" . His translator is Mark Polizzotti, head of publications at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Modiano co-wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle's film "Lacombe Lucien " (1974) The title character drifts into fascism as if by accident. "Inconclusiveness" of a search is central to his themes, says his translator. He talks about a "wistful undertone" as part of a three part love song or Edith Piaf's laments and Brassai's nocturnal photographs....which are nice contextual clues. "The periphery, where people stay just outside the law, to get by: this is the territory of the novellas," Polizzotti says. I agree with him in that the reader thinks of pulling out a map because the territory Modiano maps is so accurate. It helps to know Paris...to navigate the path he takes. I am reminded of Colm Toibin's assertion that it is essential for the novelist to know the house(and that it should be a real house) in which he places his story...and he would agree that he needs to know the streets and passageways as well...this lends reality to the narrative and steers the reader through any vague shoals. Although published separately over five years, similar characters appear and they form a single work, both the author and translator agree. Polizzotti says that Modiano evokes Wes Anderson's ensemble tragicomedies, I would agree with that. People appear at unexpected moments and coincidences occur...
As to whether the fictions are fiction Modiano says, he characterizes his novels as a "kind of autobiography, but one that is dreamed up or imaginary. Even the photographs of my parents have become portraits of imaginary characters. Only my brother, my wife and my daughters are real." As for the other figures who lend their presence to these pages, "I used their shadows and especially their names because of the sound; for me, they were nothing more than musical notes."
Then, I searched for the NYRB review, written by Anka Muhlstein, and found I had been pretty much on target... in my review in a letter to a friend who felt I had been ambiguous in my response to the book. I wanted to verify that I had gotten it right, that I had read him correctly...or his words, that is. In the review he is praised for being and author "with a virtuoso's command of language, equally at ease with the simple and the complex, the precise and the evocative," He is cited as often using the descriptive word, "bizarre". He has written more than 30 novels, all on the same theme of the cruelty of the occupation of the Germans in France. "Sordid arrangements bring together Jews on the run, secrete collaborators, crooks, Gestapo agents, impostors and victims...none of the characters turn out to be what he or she seems to be at first and that gives these stories the allure of film noir, where the rising tension reels in the reader." The novel about an amnesiac detective who has to find how who he is, it won the Goncourt Prize in 1978 and the Prix des Detectives. Dora Bruder is one of his most intriguing novels as it is about a girl found dead on a list whose parents ran an ad in the paper searching for her. She , among 80,000 others had ended up in one of the camps where she died.
So, I am taking the right approach as a reader to his writing and vision, and look forward now to reading the other two novellas. "Afterimage" and "Suspended Sentences" . His translator is Mark Polizzotti, head of publications at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Modiano co-wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle's film "Lacombe Lucien " (1974) The title character drifts into fascism as if by accident. "Inconclusiveness" of a search is central to his themes, says his translator. He talks about a "wistful undertone" as part of a three part love song or Edith Piaf's laments and Brassai's nocturnal photographs....which are nice contextual clues. "The periphery, where people stay just outside the law, to get by: this is the territory of the novellas," Polizzotti says. I agree with him in that the reader thinks of pulling out a map because the territory Modiano maps is so accurate. It helps to know Paris...to navigate the path he takes. I am reminded of Colm Toibin's assertion that it is essential for the novelist to know the house(and that it should be a real house) in which he places his story...and he would agree that he needs to know the streets and passageways as well...this lends reality to the narrative and steers the reader through any vague shoals. Although published separately over five years, similar characters appear and they form a single work, both the author and translator agree. Polizzotti says that Modiano evokes Wes Anderson's ensemble tragicomedies, I would agree with that. People appear at unexpected moments and coincidences occur...
As to whether the fictions are fiction Modiano says, he characterizes his novels as a "kind of autobiography, but one that is dreamed up or imaginary. Even the photographs of my parents have become portraits of imaginary characters. Only my brother, my wife and my daughters are real." As for the other figures who lend their presence to these pages, "I used their shadows and especially their names because of the sound; for me, they were nothing more than musical notes."
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