Patrick Modiano - Nobel Prize in Literature, 2014 (8 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."

Modiano's novels all delve into the puzzle of identity, and of trying to track evidence of existence through the traces of the past. Obsessed with the troubled and shameful period of the Occupation -- during which his father had allegedly engaged in shady dealings -- Modiano returns to this theme in all of his novels, book after book building a remarkably homogeneous work. He writes constantly about the city of Paris, describing the evolution of its streets, its habits and its people.

NIGHT ROUNDS (1969) tells the story of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo informing on the Resistance, and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and black market dealers. Under pressure from both sides to inform and bring things to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the only way to escape an impossible situation. The novel was recently re-issued in a revised translation as THE NIGHT WATCH, also included here.

RING ROADS (1972), awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman, is the story of a young Jew, Serge, in search of his father, Chalva, who disappeared from his life ten years earlier. He finds him trying to survive the war years in the unlikely company of black marketeers, anti-Semites and prostitutes, putting his meagre and not entirely orthodox business skills at the service of those who have no interest in him or his survival.

In MISSING PERSON (1978), Modiano portrays a man in pursuit of the identity he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory. On one level a detective thriller, a 1950s film noir mix of smoky cafés, illegal passports, and insubstantial figures crossing bridges in the fog, on another level it is also a haunting meditation on the nature of the self.

SUSPENDED SENTENCES is a trilogy of novellas -- "Suspended Sentences" (1988), "Flowers of Ruin" (1991), and "Afterimage" (1993) -- that form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers -- each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.

HONEYMOON (1990) 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.

In OUT OF THE DARK (1996), the narrator recalls his shadowy love affair in the 1960s with an enigmatic woman. Fifteen years after their breakup, they meet again, but she has changed her name and denies their past. What is real and what is not remain to be seen in the dreamlike novel that typifies Modiano's obsessions and elegiac prose.

DORA BRUDER (1997) is a literary hybrid, fusing together several genres -- biography, autobiography, detective novel -- to tell the history of its title character, a 15-year-old daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, who, after running away from the safety of the convent that was hiding her, ends up being deported to Auschwitz. Modiano delivers a moving account of the 10-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Occupation and the paranoia of the Pétain regime as he tries to find connections to Dora.


All the following books are in ePUB/MOBI format (three are also in PDF as indicated):

* DORA BRUDER (University of California Press, 1999). Translated by Joanna Kilmartin.

* HONEYMOON (Godine, 1995). Translated by Barbara Wright. -- ePUB/MOBI + PDF

* MISSING PERSON (Godine, 2004). Translated by Daniel Weissbort.

* NIGHT ROUNDS (Knopf, 1971). Translated by Patricia Wolf. -- ePUB/MOBI + PDF

* THE NIGHT WATCH (Bloomsbury, 2015). Translated by Patricia Wolf, revised by Frank Wynne.

* OUT OF THE DARK (University of Nebraska Press, 1998). Translated by Jordan Stump. -- ePUB/MOBI + PDF

* RING ROADS (Bloomsbury, 2015). Translated by Caroline Hillier, revised by Frank Wynne.

* SUSPENDED SENTENCES: Three Novellas (Yale UP, 2014). Translated by Mark Polizzoti.