Patrick Modiano - 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature (3 books)

PATRICK MODIANO (b. 1945) is one of France's most admired contemporary novelists and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation." He is also winner of the Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1972, the Prix Goncourt in 1978, the prestigious 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca by the Institut de France for his lifetime achievement, and the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

Modiano was born in a west Paris suburb two months after World War II ended in Europe in July 1945. His father was of Jewish Italian origins and met his Belgian actress mother during the occupation of Paris -- and his beginnings have strongly influenced his writing. Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels.

NIGHT ROUNDS (1969) takes place after the occupation when Paris is in the hands of "the rats that take over a city after the plague has wiped out most of the population." What's left, or so it appears here, is a marginal world of demimondaines, derelicts, shams, and ruthless arrivistes. The narrator is an informer, a traitor with "not enough backbone for a hero." Kirkus Reviews called the book "altogether special -- particularly in view of some writing you might call rococo pop ('great telluric waves . . . incantatory paneurhythmics') [and] the author's feeling for the city of light in the dark with its 'whiff of rot in the air.' One is caught in the haze -- spectral, sad, solitary."

HONEYMOON (1990) is "a haunting tale of quiet intensity" (Review of Contemporary Fiction). It parallels the story of Jean B., a filmmaker who abandons his wife and career to hole up in a Paris hotel, with that of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he'd met twenty years before, and whose mystery continues to haunt him.

OUT OF THE DARK (1996) is a moody, expertly rendered tale of a love affair between two drifters. The narrator, writing in 1995, looks back thirty years to a time when, having abandoned his studies and selling off old art books to get by, he comes to know Gérard Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young, enigmatic couple who seem to live off roulette winnings. He falls in love with Jacqueline; they run off to England together, where they share a few sad, aimless months, until one day she disappears. Fifteen years later, in Paris, they meet again, a reunion that only recalls the haunting inaccessibility of the past: they spend a few hours together, and the next day, Jacqueline, now married, disappears once again. Almost fifteen years after that, he sees her yet again, this time from a distance he chooses not to bridge. A profoundly affecting novel, OUT OF THE DARK is poignant, strange, delicate, melancholy, and sadly hilarious.


The following books are in PDF format:

* HONEYMOON (Godine, 1995). Translated by Barbara Wright.

* NIGHT ROUNDS (Knopf, 1971). Translated by Patricia Wolf.

* OUT OF THE DARK (University of Nebraska Press, 1998). Translated by Jordan Stump.