Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano (born July 30, 1945, Boulogne-Billancourt, France) is a French writer who in more than 40 books used his fascination with the human experience of World War II to examine individual and collective identities, responsibilities, loyalties, memory, and loss. In 2014 he became the 15th Frenchman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Upon announcing the prizewinner, the Swedish Academy cited “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” Because of his obsession with the past, Modiano was sometimes compared to Marcel Proust, though their styles and concerns were quite different.

Modiano was born in a suburb of Paris, shortly after the end of World War II, to a somewhat shadowy Jewish Italian businessman and a Flemish actress. By Modiano’s own account, he was much influenced by his geometry teacher, experimental writer Raymond Queneau, who, among other things, introduced him to the literary world. Modiano’s first novel, La Place de l’Étoile (1968; “The Star’s Place,” a reference to the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear on their clothing), concerns a Jewish collaborator and is possibly based on Modiano’s father. In 1972 his third novel, Les Boulevards de ceinture (Ring Roads), won the French Academy’s Grand Prix du Roman. His novel Rue des boutiques obscures (1978; Missing Person)—a thriller in which a man searches for his own identity—won the Prix Goncourt.

Modiano published more-or-less regularly every year or two. Among his best-known volumes are Dora Bruder (1997; Eng. trans. Dora Bruder, U.K. title The Search Warrant), an attempt to reconstruct the life of a missing Jewish girl; and a memoir of his first 21 years, Un Pedigree (2005; Eng. trans. Pedigree). Modiano’s entire oeuvre was honoured in 2014, when he was awarded both the Prix de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Nobel Prize. His later novels included Souvenirs dormants (2017; Sleep of Memory) and Encre sympathique (2019; Invisible Ink).

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Modiano wrote a children’s book (Catherine Certitude, 1988) and worked on several films. With French film director Louis Malle, Modiano wrote the screenplay for Malle’s Lacombe Lucien (1974), about a bored teenager who becomes an informer for the Gestapo during the German occupation of France. He likewise cowrote the screenplay for Egyptian director Moshé Mizrahi’s film version of Modiano’s novel Une Jeunesse (1981; film 1983) and was involved with several other films, even playing a cameo role in Chilean director Raúl Ruiz’s Genealogies of a Crime (1997).

Modiano became a noted writer of what the French call autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction. His writing style was described by one critic as “so spare and elliptical that the words seem only lightly attached to the page.” Throughout his body of work, the reader can readily sense the author’s perception of the unknowability of other people and the ambiguity of events; it is dark writing with a light touch. In a review of Honeymoon, the English translation of Modiano’s Voyage de noces (1990), one reviewer wrote, “At times he reads like a strange cross between Anita Brookner and the Ancient Mariner, forever buttonholing the reader with his own brand of exquisite angst.” Though they are usually set in a specific time and place, so much so that wartime Paris is almost a character in his books, Modiano’s works speak a universal truth about the human condition.