French author Patrick Modiano became the 111th Nobel Laureate in Literature this week.
At the award announcement, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Peter Englund made everyone feel slightly better about not having heard of Modiano, saying: “He is a well-known name in France, but not anywhere else.”
(Modiano was apparently as surprised as the rest of the world at the award: when he heard the news he was eating lunch at a restaurant with his wife. He reportedly just started laughing.)
Luckily for us, David R Godine, which has been publishing English translations of Modiano’s work since 1993, has shared excerpts from Honeymoon, Missing Person and Catherine Certitude.
Read the excerpt from Missing Person (tr. Daniel Weissbort):
Synopsis: In this strange, elegant novel, Patrick 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.
For ten years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently returned boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte’s files—directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century—but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attaché? Or was he someone else, perhaps the disappeared scion of a prominent local family? He interviews strangers and is tantalized by the half-clues until, at last, he grasps a thread that leads him through the maze of his own repressed experience.
Excerpt: I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop; the shower had started when Hutte left me.
Some hours before, we had met again for the last time on the premises of the Agency. Hutte, as usual, sat at his massive desk, but with his coat on, so that there was really an air of departure about it. I sat opposite him, in the leather armchair we kept for clients. The opaline lamp shed a bright light which dazzled me.
“Well, there we are, Guy … That’s it … ,” said Hutte, with a sigh.
A stray file lay on the desk. Maybe it was the one belonging to the dark little man with the frightened expression and the puffy face, who had hired us to follow his wife. In the afternoon, she met another dark little man with a puffy face, at a residential hotel, in Rue Vital, close to Avenue Paul-Doumer.
Thoughtfully, Hutte stroked his beard, a grizzly, close-cut beard, but one which spread out over his cheeks. His large, limpid eyes stared dreamily ahead. To the left of the desk, the wicker chair where I sat during working hours. Behind Hutte, dark wooden shelves covered half the wall: there were rows of street-and-trade directories and yearbooks of all kinds, going back over the last fifty years. Hutte had often told me that these were the essential tools of the trade and that he would never part with them. And that these directories and yearbooks constituted the most valuable and moving library you could imagine, as their pages listed people, things, vanished worlds, to which they alone bore witness.
Book details
- The Search Warrant by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9781448112982
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- Missing Person by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9781567922813
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- Night Rounds by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780394443263
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- Ring Roads: A Novel by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780575017658
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- Villa Triste by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780575022348
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- A Trace of Malice by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780856281631
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- Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780879239473
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- Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780300198058
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- Out of the Dark by Patrick Modiano
EAN: 9780803282292
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