Showing posts with label Patrick Modiano. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Patrick Modiano. Show all posts

Sunday, October 12, 2014

Nobel prize winner Patrick Modiano hailed as modern Marcel Proust

Patrick Modiano

Nobel prize winner Patrick Modiano 

hailed as modern Marcel Proust

Swedish Academy praises ‘art of memory’ in French novelist known for short works marked by sophisticated simplicity
By Mark Brown, Kim Willsher and Alison Flood
The Guaridan, Thursday 9 October 2014


The French novelist Patrick Modiano was hailed on Thursday as a Marcel Proust of our time as he was named the 2014 winner of the Nobel prize for literature.

The Swedish Academy said it was celebrating Modiano’s “art of memory”, rewarding a writer who repeatedly returns to the same themes and subjects: memory, identity and alienation all rooted in the trauma of the Nazi occupation of France.

Modiano, 69, is the 15th Frenchman – never a woman – to win the 8m kronor (£700,000) prize and follows in the footsteps of countrymen such as André Gide, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre.

While he is well known in France, Modiano is something of an unknown quantity for even the most widely read literature fans in other countries, with only a smattering of his works published in English.

That will now change. Peter Englund, the Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary, said Modiano was a very accessible writer.

“He is not at all difficult to read. He looks very simple in a sense because he has a very refined, simple, straight, clear style. You open a page and see that it is Modiano, very straight, short sentences, no frills … but it is very, very sophisticated in that simplicity.”

Modiano writes short books of about 130 pages, often in the detective genre, “but complications abound when you get underneath”.

Congratulations for the win were led by the French president, François Hollande, who said: “The republic is proud of the international recognition given, via this Nobel prize, to one of our greatest writers.

“Patrick Modiano is the 15th French person to receive this great distinction, confirming the great influence of our literature.”

The prime minister, Manuel Valls, described Modiano as a “writer of succinct, incisive literature … who is without doubt one of the greatest writers of recent years”.

Modiano himself, known to be publicity shy, has not yet commented, and the academy had been unable to contact him to tip him off.

His publisher, Antoine Gallimard, said: “I had Modiano on the telephone. I congratulated him and with his customary modesty he told me ‘it’s weird’, but he was very happy.”

Englund called him “a kind of Marcel Proust for our time” but with caveats. “This is a very different project from the one Proust once undertook. One of the central themes of Modiano’s work are the problems of reaching back; not reaching back, not understanding, not getting to grips with it.”

Modiano’s win was not a complete surprise. The bookmakers Ladbrokes had him as fourth favourite with odds of 10/1 – he was 100/1 several months ago – while the overall favourite had been the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

The choice, announced in Stockholm, will disappoint anyone hoping for a writer who was not – once again – white, European and male, although the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro was last year’s winner.

Englund said of course Modiano was a white, European male but he was one who wrote great literature.

“We don’t work according to quotas, we are just trying to give the prize to excellence and we don’t concern ourselves too much with ‘well, now we should have someone from this continent or that gender’. It would make our work impossible.”

Modiano’s work is infused with his own unhappy childhood. Born in Paris in 1945 his father was Albert Modiano, an Italian Jew who survived the war thanks to black market business deals with the Gestapo.

He largely abandoned the family and Modiano once said of his mother, a Belgian actor called Louisa Colpeyn, that her heart was so cold that her lapdog leapt from a window to its death. It is also said that he does not know where his father is buried.

Modiano was first brought up by his maternal grandparents who taught him Flemish, his first language. After that were long, unhappy years at boarding school.

He has also written children’s books and film scripts and has said that, as many writers, he is always writing the same novel – “on fait toujours le même roman”.

Probably his best known work, for which he won France’s prestigious Goncourt literary prize in 1978, is Missing Person, about a detective who loses his memory and endeavours to find it.

The winner is chosen by an academy consisting of 18 prominent Swedish literary figures. This year 210 nominations were received 36 of which were first timers.

That then became a 20-name longlist and then a five-name shortlist which involved academicians reading the entire outputs of different writers.

Modiano will receive his prize on 10 December, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. 
THE GUARDIAN



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Patrick Modiano / An appreciation of the Nobel prize in literature winner
French writer Patrick Modiano wins the 2014 Nobel prize in literature 
Nobel prize winner Patrick Modiano hailed as modern Marcel Proust


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Friday, October 10, 2014

French writer Patrick Modiano wins the 2014 Nobel prize in literature

Patrick Modiano

French writer Patrick Modiano wins the 2014 Nobel prize in literature


Novelist is 15th French writer to win prestigious award 

By Paul Owen, Mark Brown, Alison Flood and agencies
The Guardian, Thursday 9 October 2014




French novelist Patrick Modiano
Patrick Modiano is known to shun the media and rarely gives interviews.Photograph: AP
Patrick Modiano has been named the 111th winner of the Nobel prize for literature.
The 69-year-old is the 15th French writer to win the prestigious prize, worth 8m kronor ($1.1m or £700,000).
His name was announced at a short ceremony in Stockholm with Peter Englund, the Nobel Academy’s permanent secretary, reading a citation which said Modiano won “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”.
Modiano is well known in France but something of an unknown quantity for even widely read people in other countries. His best known novel is probably Missing Person, which won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978 and is about a detective who loses his memory and endeavours to find it.
The writer was born in a west Paris suburb two months after the second world war ended in Europe in July 1945.
His father was of Jewish Italian origins and met his Belgian actor mother during the occupation of Paris, and Modiano’s beginnings have strongly influenced his writing.
Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels, which include 1968’s La Place de l’Etoile – later hailed in Germany as a key post-Holocaust work.
He owes his big break to a friendship with a friend of his mother, the French writer Raymond Queneau, who was first introduced him to the Gallimard publishing house when he was in his early 20.
Modiano, who lives in Paris, is known to shun media, and rarely accords interviews. In 2012, he won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.
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’s win was not a total surprise, with Ladbrokes quoting odds of 10/1 for him earlier this week, fourth favourite behind the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o (7/2), the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami (4/1) and the Belarussian journalist Svetlana Aleksijevitj.
The winner is chosen by an academy consisting of 18 prominent Swedish literary figures. This year 210 nominations were received, 36 of which were first timers. That became a 20-name longlist and then a five-name shortlist.
Last year’s award went to the Canadian short story writer Alice Munro.
The Nobel announcements have been going on all week, and will conclude with the peace prize and prize for economics on Friday and Monday respectively.
On Wednesday Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen, William Moerner of Stanford University in California, and Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Virginia won the chemistry prize “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”.
On Tuesday Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara, shared the physics prize with Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano of Japan for “the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources”.
And on Monday, British-US scientist John O’Keefe and married couple May-Britt and Edvard Moser from Norway won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine for discovering the brain’s “inner GPS”.
Worth 8m kronor each, the Nobel prizes are always handed out on 10 December, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896. Besides the prize money, each laureate receives a diploma and a gold medal.
Nobel, a wealthy Swedish industrialist who invented dynamite, provided few directions for how to select winners, except that the prize committees should reward those who “have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind”.




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Thursday, October 9, 2014

Patrick Modiano / An appreciation of the Nobel prize in literature winner


Patrick Modiano
An appreciation of the Nobel prize 
in literature winner

As the French writer Patrick Modiano surprises critics to take the 2014 Nobel prize in literature, Rupert Thomson salutes an author who is fascinated by the louche, ambiguous, shadowy world of the Occupation
by Rupert Thomson
The Guardian, Thursday 9 October 2014


Patrick Modiano
Spare and elliptical … Patrick Modiano. Photograph: Agence VU/Camera Press

Patrick Modiano has won the Nobel prize, which is unexpected, to say the least. I have admired Modiano since my teens, when I happened on a copy of Villa Triste in the Eastbourne public library, but most British people don't seem to have heard of him, and when I last mentioned my love of his work, to a young Frenchman, I was met with a disdainful curl of the lip. "He's nostalgic," he said. This misses the point. In Modiano's books, which are often set during the Occupation, the atmospherics of nostalgia act as a servant to much deeper themes of survival and alienation. His slender masterpiece, Honeymoon, begins in a shadowy Milan hotel on a hot August afternoon. Standing at the bar, Jean B discovers that a woman he used to know took her own life in the hotel only two days before. Later, Jean goes to ground in the Parisian suburbs in an attempt to uncover the circumstances both of her death and her life. The character who vanishes is himself obsessed with a vanishing. This hall-of-mirrors effect is typical Modiano. He captures an amoral, often louche, and always ambiguous, world – a world of uncertain identities and hidden agendas. Modiano exploits all forms of genre, stealing from the spy novel and detective fiction – film noir too. But what seems to interest him most is the gaps in people's lives – the bits that have been removed or repressed, the bits that can't be accounted for. His style is so spare and elliptical that the words seem only lightly attached to the page, almost not there at all, which neatly echoes the near impossibility of what is being attempted. The case, if there is one, can never quite be solved. His books are puzzles, but they are also laments. He is meditating on the essential unknowability of others, but he is equally fascinated by the seductions and pitfalls of memory. Modiano is the poet of the Occupation and a spokesman for the disappeared, and I am thrilled that the Swedish Academy has recognised him, though I can't help wondering what that contemptuous Frenchman will be thinking.


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Patrick Modiano / Five key books


Five key books
by Patrick Modiano

1. La Place de l'Etoile, 1968
This semi-autobiographical first novel made an immediate impact with its story of the repercussions of anti-semitism in France in the second world war.
2. Rue des boutiques obscures (Missing Person) 1978
An existential tale about a detective who has lost his memory, which won Modiano the Prix Goncourt.
3. Voyage des Noces (The Honeymoon) 1990
Novel filling in the gaps left by the disappearance of Dora Bruder (see below)
4. Dora Bruder, 1997
Research, speculation and imagination combine in the story of a Jewish girl who went missing during the Occupation of France.
5. Un Pedigree (A Pedigree), 2005
The story of Modiano's own life up until his 21st year.




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