You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Winner of some of France's most prestigious literary prizes, Patrick Modiano is considered one of the most intriguing French novelists alive today. In this lucid story, Alan Morris explores Modiano's fifteen major novels. He also traces Modiano's development as a writer and the tragedies which have influenced his works: the death of his younger brother, the neglect of his father and the horror of the German occupation.
This is the first in-depth study of the twelve Modiano texts specifically concerned with life-writing in autobiographical and biographical-cum-historiographical projects. The texts covered range from La Place de l'�toile(1968) through to La Petite Bijou (2001). Close textual analysis is combined with a theoretical approach based on current thinking in autobiography, biography, and reader-response. Modiano's use of autofiction and biofiction is analysed in the light of his continuing obsession with both personal trauma and History, as well as his problematic relationship with his paternally-inherited Jewish links. His view of identity (of self and other) is thus discussed in relation to a particular literary and socio-historical context- French, postmodern, post-World War II, and post-Holocaust.
In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume--Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin—represents a sterling example of the author’s originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti’s superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano’s distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose. Although originally published separately, Modiano’s three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of ...
"It's a book less on what I did than on what others, mainly my parents, did to me" Taking in a vast gallery of extraordinary characters from Paris' post-war years, Pedigree is an autobiographical portrait of Post-War Paris and a tumultuous childhood - a childhood replete with insecurity and sorrow that informed the oeuvre of France's Nobel Laureate. With his sometime-actress mother and shady businessman father barely functioning in any parental role, the young Modiano spent his childhood being packed off to the care of others, or held at a safe distance in a grimy boarding school - which he ran away from several times. His impecunious mother had "a heart of stone"; his womanising father once called the police when his son asked him for money, and later ceased all contact with him. But for all his parents' indifference, it is the death of his younger brother when Modiano is eleven that cuts deepest, leaving a wound that can never be healed.
"This is a revised and expanded version of A Self-Conscious Art: Patrick Modiano's Postmodern Fictions by Akane Kawakami, published by Liverpool University Press in 2000"--Title page verso.
None
One man hunts obsessively for his lost identity, in this intoxicating noir masterpiece from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 'Modiano is a pure original' Adam Thirlwell 'I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop' Guy Roland, a private detective in Paris, is trying to solve the mystery of his own past. His memories erased by amnesia, he has no idea where he is from, or even his real name. As he searches for clues through the city's shadowy streets and smoky bars, latching on to strangers, accumulating mementoes, photographs, scraps and stories, he starts to piece together the events that brought him here, all leading back to the murky days of wartime occupation.
While his preoccupation with the period of the Occupation remains a permanent theme, Patrick Modiano is increasingly interested in the exploration of time and memory, and the attendant problem of reconstituting the past. This volume explores all these features. It casts new light on Modiano’s earliest novels, examines afresh his more recent work including his stories for children, situates it in the context of contemporary writing and unravels the intricacies and subtleties of his style. It underlines Modiano’s position as one of France’s major writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and will be of interest to all who are interested in the modern French novel and the complex interactions between fiction and history.
One of the hallmarks of French author Patrick Modiano’s writing is a singular ability to revisit particular motifs and episodes, infusing each telling with new detail and emotional nuance. In this evocative novel the internationally acclaimed author takes up one of his most compelling themes: a love affair with a woman who disappears, and a narrator grappling with the mystery of a relationship stopped short. Set in mid-sixties Paris, After the Circus traces the relationship between the narrator, a young man not quite of legal age, and the slightly older, enigmatic woman he first glimpses at a police interrogation. The two lovers make their uncertain way into each other’s hearts, but the narrator soon finds himself in the unsettling, ominous presence of others. Who are these people? Are they real, or simply evoked? Part romance, part detective story, this mesmerizing book fully demonstrates Modiano’s signature use of atmosphere and suggestion as he investigates the perils and the exhilaration of young love.
A young Frenchman's romance with a woman who lives off men. After stealing some money from a dentist, they go to London where she sleeps with various characters while he writes his first novel. One day she disappears for fifteen years. A study in character.