August 21, 2015 4:16 pm
The making of Modiano
Tobias Grey
The Nobel laureate’s newly translated works take us back to the beginning of his project to grapple with the dark years of Nazi rule
French novelist Patrick Modiano in Paris in 1969©Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis
French novelist Patrick Modiano in Paris in 1969
Pedigree, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti, MacLehose Press, RRP£14.99/Yale University Press, RRP$25, 144 pages
The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Étoile; The Night Watch; Ring Roads, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Caroline Hillier, Patricia Wolf and Frank Wynne, Bloomsbury, RRP£18.99/$18, 352 pages
So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Euan Cameron, MacLehose Press, RRP£14.99/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, RRP$24 160 pages
In his unflinching coming-of-age memoir, Pedigree (2004), Patrick Modiano recalls how at 13 he was first confronted with images of the Nazi extermination camps. Modiano — who was born on the outskirts of Paris in July 1945 — had accompanied his Jewish businessman father, Albert, to a cinema where they watched a documentary on the Nuremberg trials. The experience would leave an indelible impression on the future novelist, as would his father’s silence on the subject of the Holocaust. “Something changed for me that day,” he wrote. “And what did my father think? We never talked about it, not even as we left the cinema.”
The question of what Modiano’s evasive father did in occupied Paris during the war is one that has haunted the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Eventually he discovered that his father avoided wearing the obligatory yellow badge for Jews, did not register himself as one of them, and narrowly escaped deportation when “someone” intervened in his favour after he was arrested in 1943. But had Albert simply been a black marketeer who lived off his wits, as appears to have been his official line? Or was he, more tragically, what the French call a collabo — a willing collaborator with the enemy?
Before Modiano won the Nobel Prize, this most singular writer, noted for his elliptical plots and regretful tone of voice, had barely caused a ripple in the English-speaking world. Only eight of his 30 novels had been translated into English and most of those had fallen out of print. But since the award, publishers in Britain and the US have been falling over themselves to have their own Modiano moment.
Last year, Yale University Press rushed into print Suspended Sentences, a standalone book comprising a trio of newly translated novellas — Afterimage (1993), Suspended Sentences (1988) and Flowers of Ruin (1991). This month sees the UK publication of Bloomsbury’s Occupation Trilogy, a retrospective grouping devised by his Spanish publisher that constitutes translations of Modiano’s first three novels, originally published in France between 1968 and 1972. And in September, MacLehose Press will publish the first English-language translations of Pedigree and his most recent novel So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, which came out in France last year; they are to be published in the US by Yale and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In January, MacLehose will also bring out new translations of Modiano’s 2007 novel In the Café of Lost Youth and The Black Notebook (2012).
Modiano has spoken about being a product of “the dunghill of the Occupation”. His mother, Louisa Colpeyn — a Flemish-speaking Belgian actress who spent the war years in Paris working for the German-controlled French film production company Continental — died earlier this year. In Pedigree he describes her as having been “a pretty girl with an arid heart” whose encounter with his father was a “rash” one. “Periods of great turbulence often lead to rash encounters, with the result that I’ve never felt like a legitimate son, much less an heir,” Modiano writes.
His fictions are most often meditations on identity and contain autobiographical elements — notably the names of streets where the author has lived or places he used to frequent. The 1978 Prix Goncourt-winning Missing Person, about an amnesiac detective investigating his own past, is just such a novel. Though he rarely invokes the Holocaust directly, its horrific violence — both physical and moral — seethes beneath the surface.
Modiano became famous in France at the end of the 1960s for being one of the country’s first novelists to dare to write about the underbelly of the Occupation and, in particular, about the French Gestapo. His novels, with domestic sales often in excess of 100,000 copies, receive the attention of the top French critics, who invariably describe his elegant, pared-down prose in terms of “la petite musique de Modiano”.
He is not much of a joiner and has turned down several requests by the Académie Française to become an immortel. For a long time Modiano lied about his age, telling interviewers that he was born in 1947 (the year his brother Rudy was born). His French biographer Denis Cosnard has suggested this was a way for Modiano to both pay homage to his brother, who died from leukaemia aged 10, and to distance himself from the war. At the beginning of his novel Ring Roads, Modiano quotes one of his favourite poets, Arthur Rimbaud: “If only I had a past at some other point in French history! But no, nothing.”
Ring Roads forms the third part of the Occupation Trilogy, which, along with The Night Watch (Modiano’s second novel), had already been translated into English in the early 1970s. Both have been subsequently revised for the new edition. The real discovery, though, is the first English-language translation of Modiano’s controversial debut, La Place de l’Étoile, originally published in 1968 when the author was only 22.
No doubt it took the imprimatur of Modiano winning the Nobel Prize to finally reveal La Place to English-language readers in all its youthful and frenetic glory. The novel’s protagonist is the wretchedly-named Raphäel Schlemilovitch — from the Yiddish tradition meaning son of a schlemiel (one who is bereft of luck). The luckless Raphäel is both Jewish collabo and anti-Semite to boot. In a tour-de-force of inventive pastiche, Modiano appropriates the chiselled, curt sentences and polemical style of collaborationist writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lucien Rebatet and the journalist Robert Brasillach (all of whose books he had discovered in his father’s library) to depict a wartime France awash in corruption, complacency and concupiscence.
It was the work of an angry young man who wanted to torpedo the Gaullist myth of France as a country full of resistance fighters. It was also a son’s revenge. “In my first book I wanted to reply to all those people whose insults hurt me on account of my father,” writes Modiano in Dora Bruder (1997) — his peerless book about his investigation into the disappearance of a Jewish teenager during the war. “And [I wanted] to do it on the battlefield of French prose by once and for all reducing them to silence.”
Modiano’s vocation as a writer has always been about keeping memory alive, however much others might be keen to move on and forget. There remain some in Paris who would prefer for the Occupation, often referred to as les années noires, to be less visibly integrated into the city’s architecture. Last year outrage ensued when it was discovered that after some building work a plaque at 93, Rue Lauriston, commemorating the lives of tortured Resistance members, had not been replaced.
Though he rarely invokes the Holocaust directly, its horrific violence — both physical and moral — seethes beneath the surface of his novels
The business that rented the address — where the French Gestapo had its headquarters between 1941 and 1944 — argued that retaining the plaque would confront their clients with a bitter reminder of the past. The news surely didn’t escape Modiano’s attention. His father once had an office at nearby Rue Lord Byron and the author spent a great deal of time exploring the environs of the 16th arrondissement.
The Night Watch, published in 1969, features characters who are very closely based on Pierre Bonny and Henri Lafont, leading figures in the French Gestapo whose gang was known as “La Bande de la Rue Lauriston”. Into their midst Modiano introduces a rootless young man. He is not evil per se but far too easily influenced by those with more experience than himself: “Not enough moral fibre to be a hero. Too dispassionate and distracted to be a real villain. On the other hand, I was malleable, I had a fondness for action, and I was plainly good-natured.”
The novel’s protagonist is remarkably similar to the one Modiano and Louis Malle came up with in their screenplay for the Bafta-award winning film Lacombe, Lucien (1974). Both eschew a focus on ideology to show a young man being shaped by the environment in which he finds himself. In Lacombe, Lucien, this means presenting a thrill-seeking lout who, after being turned down by the French Resistance as a potential recruit, soon finds himself presented with the opportunity of enrolling with the enemy.
Some influential French film critics such as Serge Daney attacked Modiano and Malle for the blankness of their protagonist and a general lack of psychological insight. But it is precisely the passivity of these characters that explains their corruptibility. The world they enter into, to borrow Modiano’s words, is one of “flashy foreigners, abortionists, swindlers, hack journalists, shyster lawyers and crooked accountants”, not to mention “a whole battalion of women of easy virtue, erotic dancers, morphine addicts”. Ring Roads, which was published three years after The Night Watch, navigated similarly murky waters in its story of a young Jew who goes in search of his collaborationist father.
It is a world the novelist still contemplates today but in a far more restrained key. As a study in contrasts it is fascinating to read Modiano’s most recent novel, last year’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood alongside La Place de l’Étoile. There is still plenty of moral unpleasantness at play but the focus has narrowed and the intrigue has grown less haphazard.
The story begins when a reclusive but eminently sane writer, Jean Daragane, is contacted by a stranger, who says he has found the author’s address book and wants to return it to him in person. From this slender premise Modiano weaves a complex tale which switches between past and present. The Occupation is never mentioned but Daragane’s fallible memories are of a peripatetic upbringing straight after the war and the wayward individuals he encountered while his parents were absent.
Some French critics have suggested that So You Don’t Get Lost is Modiano’s most autobiographical novel yet. In his beautifully wrought Nobel lecture, he hinted as much by evoking his upbringing and how it shaped his future as a writer. Modiano recounted how he often found himself away from his parents, staying with their friends, about whom he knew nothing. (His mother was often touring in theatrical productions and his father’s fruitless business-dealings frequently took him abroad.)
At the time Modiano didn’t think much of it but later he tried — in vain — to find out more about the people on whom his parents had foisted him. Such early efforts to resolve enigmas beyond his grasp persuaded Modiano, he said in the Nobel lecture, to turn to fiction — “as if writing and the imagination could help me finally tie up all those loose ends”.
Tobias Grey is a critic based in Paris
The making of Modiano
Tobias Grey
The Nobel laureate’s newly translated works take us back to the beginning of his project to grapple with the dark years of Nazi rule
French novelist Patrick Modiano in Paris in 1969©Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis
French novelist Patrick Modiano in Paris in 1969
Pedigree, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti, MacLehose Press, RRP£14.99/Yale University Press, RRP$25, 144 pages
The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Étoile; The Night Watch; Ring Roads, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Caroline Hillier, Patricia Wolf and Frank Wynne, Bloomsbury, RRP£18.99/$18, 352 pages
So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Euan Cameron, MacLehose Press, RRP£14.99/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, RRP$24 160 pages
In his unflinching coming-of-age memoir, Pedigree (2004), Patrick Modiano recalls how at 13 he was first confronted with images of the Nazi extermination camps. Modiano — who was born on the outskirts of Paris in July 1945 — had accompanied his Jewish businessman father, Albert, to a cinema where they watched a documentary on the Nuremberg trials. The experience would leave an indelible impression on the future novelist, as would his father’s silence on the subject of the Holocaust. “Something changed for me that day,” he wrote. “And what did my father think? We never talked about it, not even as we left the cinema.”
The question of what Modiano’s evasive father did in occupied Paris during the war is one that has haunted the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Eventually he discovered that his father avoided wearing the obligatory yellow badge for Jews, did not register himself as one of them, and narrowly escaped deportation when “someone” intervened in his favour after he was arrested in 1943. But had Albert simply been a black marketeer who lived off his wits, as appears to have been his official line? Or was he, more tragically, what the French call a collabo — a willing collaborator with the enemy?
Before Modiano won the Nobel Prize, this most singular writer, noted for his elliptical plots and regretful tone of voice, had barely caused a ripple in the English-speaking world. Only eight of his 30 novels had been translated into English and most of those had fallen out of print. But since the award, publishers in Britain and the US have been falling over themselves to have their own Modiano moment.
Last year, Yale University Press rushed into print Suspended Sentences, a standalone book comprising a trio of newly translated novellas — Afterimage (1993), Suspended Sentences (1988) and Flowers of Ruin (1991). This month sees the UK publication of Bloomsbury’s Occupation Trilogy, a retrospective grouping devised by his Spanish publisher that constitutes translations of Modiano’s first three novels, originally published in France between 1968 and 1972. And in September, MacLehose Press will publish the first English-language translations of Pedigree and his most recent novel So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, which came out in France last year; they are to be published in the US by Yale and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In January, MacLehose will also bring out new translations of Modiano’s 2007 novel In the Café of Lost Youth and The Black Notebook (2012).
Modiano has spoken about being a product of “the dunghill of the Occupation”. His mother, Louisa Colpeyn — a Flemish-speaking Belgian actress who spent the war years in Paris working for the German-controlled French film production company Continental — died earlier this year. In Pedigree he describes her as having been “a pretty girl with an arid heart” whose encounter with his father was a “rash” one. “Periods of great turbulence often lead to rash encounters, with the result that I’ve never felt like a legitimate son, much less an heir,” Modiano writes.
His fictions are most often meditations on identity and contain autobiographical elements — notably the names of streets where the author has lived or places he used to frequent. The 1978 Prix Goncourt-winning Missing Person, about an amnesiac detective investigating his own past, is just such a novel. Though he rarely invokes the Holocaust directly, its horrific violence — both physical and moral — seethes beneath the surface.
Modiano became famous in France at the end of the 1960s for being one of the country’s first novelists to dare to write about the underbelly of the Occupation and, in particular, about the French Gestapo. His novels, with domestic sales often in excess of 100,000 copies, receive the attention of the top French critics, who invariably describe his elegant, pared-down prose in terms of “la petite musique de Modiano”.
He is not much of a joiner and has turned down several requests by the Académie Française to become an immortel. For a long time Modiano lied about his age, telling interviewers that he was born in 1947 (the year his brother Rudy was born). His French biographer Denis Cosnard has suggested this was a way for Modiano to both pay homage to his brother, who died from leukaemia aged 10, and to distance himself from the war. At the beginning of his novel Ring Roads, Modiano quotes one of his favourite poets, Arthur Rimbaud: “If only I had a past at some other point in French history! But no, nothing.”
Ring Roads forms the third part of the Occupation Trilogy, which, along with The Night Watch (Modiano’s second novel), had already been translated into English in the early 1970s. Both have been subsequently revised for the new edition. The real discovery, though, is the first English-language translation of Modiano’s controversial debut, La Place de l’Étoile, originally published in 1968 when the author was only 22.
No doubt it took the imprimatur of Modiano winning the Nobel Prize to finally reveal La Place to English-language readers in all its youthful and frenetic glory. The novel’s protagonist is the wretchedly-named Raphäel Schlemilovitch — from the Yiddish tradition meaning son of a schlemiel (one who is bereft of luck). The luckless Raphäel is both Jewish collabo and anti-Semite to boot. In a tour-de-force of inventive pastiche, Modiano appropriates the chiselled, curt sentences and polemical style of collaborationist writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lucien Rebatet and the journalist Robert Brasillach (all of whose books he had discovered in his father’s library) to depict a wartime France awash in corruption, complacency and concupiscence.
It was the work of an angry young man who wanted to torpedo the Gaullist myth of France as a country full of resistance fighters. It was also a son’s revenge. “In my first book I wanted to reply to all those people whose insults hurt me on account of my father,” writes Modiano in Dora Bruder (1997) — his peerless book about his investigation into the disappearance of a Jewish teenager during the war. “And [I wanted] to do it on the battlefield of French prose by once and for all reducing them to silence.”
Modiano’s vocation as a writer has always been about keeping memory alive, however much others might be keen to move on and forget. There remain some in Paris who would prefer for the Occupation, often referred to as les années noires, to be less visibly integrated into the city’s architecture. Last year outrage ensued when it was discovered that after some building work a plaque at 93, Rue Lauriston, commemorating the lives of tortured Resistance members, had not been replaced.
Though he rarely invokes the Holocaust directly, its horrific violence — both physical and moral — seethes beneath the surface of his novels
The business that rented the address — where the French Gestapo had its headquarters between 1941 and 1944 — argued that retaining the plaque would confront their clients with a bitter reminder of the past. The news surely didn’t escape Modiano’s attention. His father once had an office at nearby Rue Lord Byron and the author spent a great deal of time exploring the environs of the 16th arrondissement.
The Night Watch, published in 1969, features characters who are very closely based on Pierre Bonny and Henri Lafont, leading figures in the French Gestapo whose gang was known as “La Bande de la Rue Lauriston”. Into their midst Modiano introduces a rootless young man. He is not evil per se but far too easily influenced by those with more experience than himself: “Not enough moral fibre to be a hero. Too dispassionate and distracted to be a real villain. On the other hand, I was malleable, I had a fondness for action, and I was plainly good-natured.”
The novel’s protagonist is remarkably similar to the one Modiano and Louis Malle came up with in their screenplay for the Bafta-award winning film Lacombe, Lucien (1974). Both eschew a focus on ideology to show a young man being shaped by the environment in which he finds himself. In Lacombe, Lucien, this means presenting a thrill-seeking lout who, after being turned down by the French Resistance as a potential recruit, soon finds himself presented with the opportunity of enrolling with the enemy.
Some influential French film critics such as Serge Daney attacked Modiano and Malle for the blankness of their protagonist and a general lack of psychological insight. But it is precisely the passivity of these characters that explains their corruptibility. The world they enter into, to borrow Modiano’s words, is one of “flashy foreigners, abortionists, swindlers, hack journalists, shyster lawyers and crooked accountants”, not to mention “a whole battalion of women of easy virtue, erotic dancers, morphine addicts”. Ring Roads, which was published three years after The Night Watch, navigated similarly murky waters in its story of a young Jew who goes in search of his collaborationist father.
It is a world the novelist still contemplates today but in a far more restrained key. As a study in contrasts it is fascinating to read Modiano’s most recent novel, last year’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood alongside La Place de l’Étoile. There is still plenty of moral unpleasantness at play but the focus has narrowed and the intrigue has grown less haphazard.
The story begins when a reclusive but eminently sane writer, Jean Daragane, is contacted by a stranger, who says he has found the author’s address book and wants to return it to him in person. From this slender premise Modiano weaves a complex tale which switches between past and present. The Occupation is never mentioned but Daragane’s fallible memories are of a peripatetic upbringing straight after the war and the wayward individuals he encountered while his parents were absent.
Some French critics have suggested that So You Don’t Get Lost is Modiano’s most autobiographical novel yet. In his beautifully wrought Nobel lecture, he hinted as much by evoking his upbringing and how it shaped his future as a writer. Modiano recounted how he often found himself away from his parents, staying with their friends, about whom he knew nothing. (His mother was often touring in theatrical productions and his father’s fruitless business-dealings frequently took him abroad.)
At the time Modiano didn’t think much of it but later he tried — in vain — to find out more about the people on whom his parents had foisted him. Such early efforts to resolve enigmas beyond his grasp persuaded Modiano, he said in the Nobel lecture, to turn to fiction — “as if writing and the imagination could help me finally tie up all those loose ends”.
Tobias Grey is a critic based in Paris
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