Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Degree Zero Voices: The Empty Narrator
- 2 Disorderly Narratives: The Order of Narration
- 3 Unreal Stories: The ‘effet d'irréel’
- 4 Being Serious: Modiano's Use of History
- 5 Being Playful: Parody and Disappointment
- 6 Being Popular: The Modiano Novel
- 7 Being a Woman: Mothers and Lovers
- 8 Being Eternal: The Endless Recurrence of Time and Writing
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Degree Zero Voices: The Empty Narrator
- 2 Disorderly Narratives: The Order of Narration
- 3 Unreal Stories: The ‘effet d'irréel’
- 4 Being Serious: Modiano's Use of History
- 5 Being Playful: Parody and Disappointment
- 6 Being Popular: The Modiano Novel
- 7 Being a Woman: Mothers and Lovers
- 8 Being Eternal: The Endless Recurrence of Time and Writing
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The announcement that Modiano had won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature came, it seems, as a surprise to many. ‘Patrick Modiano plutôt que Philip Roth, ou Haruki Murakami. Les académiciens suédois qui attribuent le prix Nobel de littérature ne détestent pas étonner le monde. Mais si la surprise est de taille, elle est aussi excellente’. His French readers were surprised, then delighted; a popular writer since the publication of his very first novels, Modiano has been a steadfast bestseller in his native country for well over forty years. Readers, critics and journalists were united in their delight that the prize had gone to the self-effacing, modest and famously inarticulate writer; satisfied, too, that his numerous novels, addictive for many and translated into thirty-six languages, had been thus rewarded.
Modiano's Nobel acceptance speech–which his fans had awaited with a certain trepidation, aware as they were of his disastrous appearances on Apostrophes in the past –was, despite starting with a reference to his tendency to ‘balbutiement’, an admirably fluent account of his trajectory as a writer, his favourite themes, and his place in modern French literature. Modestly claiming that his readers knew more than he did about his own novels, and comparing his experience of writing to driving slowly in slippery and low visibility conditions, he went on to describe a feature of his novels that has been much remarked upon throughout his career, their resemblance to each other:
Le manque de lucidité et de recul critique d'un romancier vis-à-vis de l'ensemble de ses propres livres tient aussi à un phénomène que j'ai remarqué dans mon cas et dans celui de beaucoup d'autres : chaque nouveau livre, au moment de l’écrire, efface le précédent au point que j'ai l'impression de l'avoir oublié. Je croyais les avoir écrits les uns après les autres de manière discontinue, à coups d'oublis successifs, mais souvent les mêmes visages, les mêmes noms, les mêmes lieux, les mêmes phrases reviennent de l'un à l'autre, comme les motifs d'une tapisserie que l'on aurait tissée dans un demi-sommeil.
This quality of self-resemblance, or consistency, is one of the reasons why the present volume–which is a new, augmented edition of a previous study–has become possible.
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- Information
- Patrick Modiano , pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2015