The NEW YORK
Patrick Modiano’s Postwar World
By Alexandra Schwartz
Modiano’s first novel appeared at a moment when the core tenet of French postwar identity was beginning to crumble.
Credit Richard Dumas / Agence VU
The committee in charge of awarding the Nobel Prize
in Literature likes to crown its laureates with pronouncements that can
seem as incomprehensible as its choice of winner often does. The
committee reaches for poetic heights as if in tribute to the
accomplishment of the writer it honors; we, the common reader, pore over
the announcements like pilgrims who have gone to consult the oracle at
Delphi and come away with garbled fortune cookies. J. M. G. Le Clézio,
the French novelist who won in 2008, was praised as an “author of new
departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity
beyond and below the reigning civilization”; J. M. Coetzee, 2003’s
laureate, “in innumerable guises portrays the surprising involvement of
the outsider”; Harold Pinter, who won in 2005, alliteratively “uncovers
the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s
closed rooms.” (It was a relief to learn, last year, that Alice Munro
was simply a “master of the contemporary short story.”)
Today,
the prize went to the French novelist Patrick Modiano, “for the art of
memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and
uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” Modiano, who is sixty-nine
and has been steadily publishing novels since 1968 (his latest, “Pour
Que Tu Ne Te Perdes Pas Dans le Quartier,” came out last week), is
famous in France, but practically no one here has heard of him. Yale
University Press is coming out with a volume of three of his novellas,
but the vast bulk of his work remains unavailable in English.
Who
is this writer, and what are the ungraspable human destinies he has
uncovered? Modiano was born near Paris in July, 1945, to a Flemish
mother and a father from a Jewish family with roots in Salonika. He
worked his way to the Lycée Henri-IV, the top preparatory school in
France, but his formal education ended at seventeen. The five years that
followed his baccalaureate were “my novelistic motor,” Modiano told the
French magazine Les Inrockuptibles in 2012. Estranged from his
family, he roamed around Paris, selling books to make money; he learned
to copy the handwriting of famous writers like Paul Valéry and Alain
Robbe-Grillet and forged title-page dedications. “It was a bizarre,
chaotic period,” Modiano said. The disastrous Algerian War, which had
taken up the better part of a decade, had just ended. It was, for
Modiano, “a period of strange encounters with older people, who
instilled in me the feeling of a permanent danger.”
Like
Rushdie’s midnight’s children, Europeans born in 1945 share a certain
liminal condition. They escaped the threat, but not the taint, of the
war. They were born into freedom but conceived in turmoil; they grew up
looking over their shoulders. In 1969, Anselm Kiefer, who was born two
months before Modiano, produced “Occupations,” a series of photographs
that show him posing at locations in Italy, Switzerland, and France with
his arm raised in a ghostly Sieg Heil. Kiefer, a German, was visiting
the scenes of the crime in the guise of the criminal. He wanted, as he
put it, not to find out “whether I am a Nazi, but whether I would have
been one.” Modiano’s first novel, published the year before
“Occupations,” involves a similar kind of projection into the narrowly
escaped past. Set in 1942 in a phantasmagoric Paris (Proust, Freud,
Hitler, and Dreyfus all make appearances), it is called “La Place de
l’Étoile”—a reference to the rotunda at the head of the Champs Elysées
that circles the Arc de Triomphe, but also to the yellow felt star worn
by Jews during the Occupation.
“La Place de
l’Étoile” appeared at a moment when the core tenet of French postwar
identity—“the myth of France as a nation of resisters,” as the French
writer Clémence Boulouque put it to me when I called her to discuss
Modiano’s win—was beginning to crumble. (The book was published in May,
1968, the same month that the famous student protests in Paris began;
General de Gaulle, the President of the Republic and the living symbol
of French heroism during the war, fled to a military base in Germany to
wait it all out.) Modiano knew the soiled truth firsthand. His father
had refused to wear the star and did not turn himself in when Paris’s
Jews were rounded up for deportation to concentration camps; he spent
the war doing business on the black market and hanging around with the
Gestapo stationed on the Rue Lauriston. Boulouque, who is currently a
post-doctoral fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of
Pennsylvania, told me that in his three dozen or so novels Modiano has
returned again and again to the same themes: the pull of the past, the
threat of disappearance, the blurring of moral boundaries, “the dark
side of the soul.” Modiano, she told me, believes that “the novelist has
an ethical duty to record the traces of the people who have vanished,
the people who were made to disappear.” It will not have escaped the
attention of the Nobel committee that Modiano’s win comes at a time when
anti-Semitism in France is on the rise, as is the rate of French Jews’
emigration to Israel. The fear that French Jews are not safe in their
own land, that French Jewish culture may vanish, is once again palpable,
and real.
Boulouque
wrote a master’s thesis on Modiano, and he subsequently helped her
publish her first book. She considers him to be the greatest living
French writer. “I’m jumping up and down,” she said. “I cried tears of
joy.”
The reaction in France, too, has been
largely celebratory. The country is no stranger to the Nobel; Modiano is
their fifteenth literature laureate, but after Le Clézio’s 2008 win the
possibility of another so soon seemed a distant prospect.
Stylistically, Modiano is certainly French; in an e-mail, Josyane
Savigneau, of Le Monde, called his writing “delicate, subtle,
restrained,” and praised the man himself as discrete and generous,
detached from his literary celebrity. “He doesn’t create symphonies or
operas,” she wrote, “but he’s an excellent pianist.”
Still,
however glad she was to see the Nobel go to Modiano, Savigneau wrote
that she was “indignant, as ever, to see them forget Roth.” Fair to say
that she’s far from the only one. Congratulations to Patrick Modiano,
and to the translators who may soon be gainfully employed putting many
of his works into English. But, as the saying goes in Newark, next year
in Stockholm.