Today, the French writer Patrick Modiano was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. The Guardian notes that “Modiano is well known in France but something of an unknown quantity for even the most widely read people in other countries”:
[The Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary Peter] Englund said: “Patrick Modiano is a well-known name in France but not anywhere else. He writes children’s books, movie scripts but mainly novels. His themes are memory, identity and time. His best known work is called Missing Person. It’s the story about a detective who has lost his memory and his final case is finding out who he really is; he is tracing his own steps through history to find out who he is.”
He added: “They are small books, 130, 150 pages, which are always variations of the same theme – memory, loss, identity, seeking. Those are his important themes: memory, identity, and time.”
Modiano spoke to Julien Bisson in a rare interview in 2011:
“Actually, I never thought of doing anything else,” he says of his literary career. “I had no diploma, no definite goal to achieve. But it is tough for a young writer to begin so early. Really, I prefer not to read my early books. Not that I don’t like them, but I don’t recognize myself anymore, like an old actor watching himself as a young leading man.”
Modiano’s novels all delve into the puzzle of identity:
How can I track evidence of my existence through the traces of the past? Obsessed with the troubled and shameful period of the Occupation—during which his father had engaged in some shady dealings—Modiano returns to this theme in all of his novels, book after book building a remarkably homogeneous work. “After each novel, I have the impression that I have cleared it all away,” he says between two silences. “But I know I’ll come back over and over again to tiny details, little things that are part of what I am. In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born.” The place, for him, is Paris, the city he writes about constantly, describing the evolution of its streets, its habits and its people. In fact, Modiano might very well be to Paris what Woody Allen is to New York: a memory and a conscience.
In a 2010 piece for The Millions, J.P. Smith wrote about reading Modiano in French:
His theme is unchanging; his style, “la petite musique,” as the French say, is virtually the same from book to book. There is nothing “big” about his work, and readers have grown accustomed to considering each succeeding volume as an added chapter to an ongoing literary project. His twenty-five published novels rarely are longer than 200 pages, and in them his characters, who seem to drift, under different names, into first this novel, then another, wander the streets of Paris looking for a familiar place, a remembered face, some link to their elusive past, some ghost from a half-remembered encounter that might shed some light on one’s history. Phone numbers and addresses are dredged up from the past, only to bring more cryptic clues and, if not dead ends, then the kind of silence that hides a deeper and more painful truth.
In a review of Missing Person, Ted Gioia emphasized that “Modiano doesn’t hesitate in shaking up the conventions of the mystery genre”:
The missing person in the title … is the detective himself. Guy Roland suffers from amnesia, the period of his life before launching his career as a private investigator is almost a complete blank. Even his name and nationality are a mystery to him. Now after a career of solving other people’s problems, he turns to his own. …
Those who like the mystery genre for its neat resolutions and the comforting sense of closure from a crime solved, justice up-held, and a perpetrator punished, will only get a queasy sensation from Missing Person. In this quest for identity, the very notion of self begins to fade under close scrutiny. “Do not our lives dissolve into the evening?” our narrator concludes, as he accepts the possibility that the person he is seeking will never be found, his identity as ephemeral as “the sand holds the traces of our footsteps but a few moments.”
Meanwhile, Emma Brockes uses Modiano’s win to explore the politics of the Nobel awards, remarking that “the real scandal of Patrick Modiano’s Nobel win is that Philip Roth is a huge loser – again”:
There are lots of theories about Nobel “bias”, few of them involving the possibility that writers from non-English speaking countries, many of whom readers in the west have neither read nor heard of, might actually be quite good. The Royal Swedish Academy’s appointed judges themselves say they don’t like the effects of the creative writing school battery farms on the New York publishing scene. More widely, the Nobel is seen as the perfect platform from which to counter US cultural hegemony; and there’s a notion that the snobbish Nobel judges don’t like to reward authors who actually sell. …
Anyway, Modiano won. Good for him and his many fans around the world. Now on to the more important question: Who becomes the next Philip Roth, champion novelist whose once-a-year loss we can all get behind?
The Dish 