French novelist Patrick Modiano wins Nobel Prize in literature

HENRIK MONTGOMERY

French novelist Patrick Modiano, much of whose work centers on the Nazi occupation of France, has won the 2014 Nobel Prize in literature.

Little known to readers abroad, Modiano is the 14th Nobel laureate writing in French. The last French author to win the coveted award was novelist Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, in 2008.

At a news conference in Paris, the media-shy Modiano said, “I wasn’t expecting it at all. It was like I was a bit detached from it all, as if a doppelganger with my name had won.”

Modiano was born in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt on July 30, 1945, two months after the end of World War II in France. In announcing the $1.1 million prize, Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy in Stockholm, praised Modiano “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”

The war and the German occupation of Paris have been at the heart of many of Modiano’s books, including the 1977 novel “Dora Bruder,” which was translated into English in 1999 by the University of California Press. The novel is based on the true story of a 15-year-old Parisian girl who dies in the Holocaust.

Modiano’s parents met during the occupation of Paris; his father had Jewish Italian roots, and his Belgian mother was an actress.

Modiano published his first novel, the post-Holocaust “La Place de l’Etoile,” in 1968. His novel “Missing Person” won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978. His most recent novel is “So That You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood,” published this month in France.

“They are small books, 130, 150 pages, which are always variations of the same theme — memory, loss, identity, seeking,” Englund said. “Those are his important themes: memory, identity and time.”

In addition to his novels, Modiano has written children’s books and worked on films. He and film director Louis Malle wrote the script for Malle’s 1974 “Lacombe, Lucien,” about a small-town French teenager who is recruited by pro-German collaborators.

Modiano credits the absurdist author Raymond Queneau (best known for “Zazie dans le Métro”) for getting him his start as a writer; Queneau was Modiano’s high school geometry teacher.

Many fault the Swedish Academy for awarding little-known writers, but some of those writers, including Japan’s Kenzaburo Oe, have gained many more readers thanks to the prize. David R. Godine, a small publishing house in Boston, stands to gain from Modiano’s award, having published several of his books.

Yale University Press announced Thursday that it will publish Modiano’s “Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas” in November. Published separately in France, the novellas focus on “orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers — each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.”

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