Patrick Modiano

Jean Patrick Modiano (; born 30 July 1945), generally known as Patrick Modiano, is a French novelist and recipient of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is a noted writer of autofiction, the blend of autobiography and historical fiction.

In more than 40 books, Modiano has used his fascination with the human experience of World War II in France to examine individual and collective identities, responsibilities, loyalties, memory, and loss. Because of his obsession with the past, and precisely, his own family's past, he is sometimes compared to Marcel Proust. Modiano's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have been celebrated in and around France, but most of his novels had not been translated into English before he was awarded the Nobel Prize. His mother, Louisa Colpeyn (1918–2015), was a Flemish actress. Modiano's parents met in occupied Paris during World War II and began their relationship semi-clandestinely (they separated shortly after Patrick's birth). Albert Modiano never clearly spoke of this period to his son before his death in 1977. The absence of his father, and frequently also of his mother who went on tour, brought him closer to his brother, Rudy, who was two years younger and died of a disease at age 9. Patrick Modiano dedicated his works from 1967 to 1982 to Rudy. Recalling this tragic period in his memoir Un Pedigree (2005), Modiano said: "I couldn't write an autobiography, that's why I called it a 'pedigree': It's a book less on what I did than on what others, mainly my parents, did to me."

As a child, Modiano studied at the École du Montcel primary school in Jouy-en-Josas, at the Collège Saint-Joseph de Thônes in Haute-Savoie, and then at the Lycée Henri-IV high school in Paris. While he was at Henri-IV, he took geometry lessons from writer Raymond Queneau, who was a friend of Modiano's mother. He received his baccalauréat in Annecy in 1964. His father enrolled him in hypokhâgne against his will and he soon stopped attending classes. In 1965, he enrolled at the Sorbonne to qualify for a college deferment from the military draft, but did not obtain a degree.

Marriage and family In 1970, Modiano married Dominique Zehrfuss. In a 2003 interview with Elle, she said: "I have a catastrophic memory of the day of our marriage. It rained. A real nightmare. Our groomsmen were Queneau, who had mentored Patrick since his adolescence, and Malraux, a friend of my father. They started to argue about Dubuffet, and it was like we were watching a tennis match! That said, it would have been funny to have some photos, but the only person who had a camera forgot to bring the film. There is only one photo remaining of us, from behind and under an umbrella!" They had two daughters, Zina (1974) and Marie (1978).

Writing career His meeting with Queneau, author of Zazie dans le métro, was crucial. It was Queneau who introduced Modiano to the literary world, giving him the opportunity to attend a cocktail party thrown by his future publisher Éditions Gallimard. In 1968 at the age of 22, Modiano published his first book La Place de l'Étoile, a wartime novel about a Jewish collaborator, after having read the manuscript to Queneau. The novel displeased his father so much that he tried to buy all existing copies of the book. Earlier (1959) while stranded in London, Modiano had called his father to request a little financial assistance, but his father had rebuffed him. Another time (1965), his mother sent Patrick to the father's apartment to demand a tardy child-support payment, and in response the father's girlfriend called the police. La Place de l'Étoile was published in English in August 2015 together with two other of Modiano's wartime novels, under the title, The Occupation Trilogy. He wrote by piecing together newspaper cuttings, vague testimonies and old telephone directories, looking at outsider living on the outskirts of the city. Various documents concerning Dora were subsequently communicated to Modiano by the lawyer Serge Klasfeld, who had used them in his "Memorial to the Deportation of the Jews of France". Regarding Dora Bruder, he wrote: "I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped for the second time. That is her secret." Modiano's quiet, austere novels, which also include La Ronde de nuit, are described as reading like "compassionate, regretful thrillers."

Modiano's 2007 novel Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue is set in 1960s Paris where a group of people, including a detective of shady background, wonder what is or was the matter with a certain young woman called Louki, who, we are told on the last page, ended her life by throwing herself out a window. Even though there are plenty of geographical details, the reader is left with a sense of vagueness as to what happened and when. For the first time throughout his oeuvre, Modiano uses various narrators who relate from their point of view what they think they know about the woman. In the third of five chapters, the protagonist herself relates episodes from her life, but she remains difficult to grasp. The author creates a number of instabilities on various levels of his text and this signifies how literary figures can(not) be created. The protagonist evades being grasped.

In Modiano's 26th book, L'Horizon (2011), the narrator, Jean Bosmans, a fragile man pursued by his mother's ghost, dwells on his youth and the people he has lost. Among them is the enigmatic Margaret Le Coz, a young woman whom he met and fell in love with in the 1960s. The two loners spent several weeks wandering the winding streets of a now long-forgotten Paris, fleeing a phantom menace. One day, however, without notice, Margaret boarded a train and vanished into the void—but not from Jean's memory. Forty years later, he is ready to look for his vanished love. The novel not only epitomizes Modiano's style and concerns but also marks a new step in his personal quest, after a mysterious walkabout in Berlin. "The city is my age," he says, describing Berlin which is almost a completely new city rebuilt from the ashes of war. "Its long, geometric avenues still bear the marks of history. But if you look at it right, you can still spot ancient wastelands beneath the concrete. These are the very roots of my generation." Besson remarks that such symbolic roots gave rise, over the years, "to one of the most wonderful trees in French literature."

Nobel Prize in Literature

Patrick Modiano with Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy at the press conference. On 9 October 2014, the Swedish Academy announced that that year's Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Patrick Modiano "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation." Modiano was the 15th French writer to be awarded the prize.

Though Modiano was the fourth favourite on Ladbrokes to win the 2014 Nobel Prize, the choice of Modiano was described as unexpected. Modiano himself found it unexpected, but said he was "touched" by the recognition.

At the award ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December 2014, Jesper Svenbro of the Swedish Academy said:

Awards and honors 1968: Prix Roger-Nimier and the Prix Fénéon for La Place de l'Étoile 1972: Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française for Les Boulevards de ceinture 1976: Prix des libraires for Villa Triste 1978: Prix Goncourt for Rue des Boutiques obscures 1984: Prix littéraire Prince-Pierre-de-Monaco for his body of work 1990: Prix Relay for Voyage de noces 2000: Grand prix de littérature Paul-Morand for his body of work 2002: Prix Jean-Monnet de littérature européenne du département de Charente for La Petite Bijou 2010: Prix mondial Cino Del Duca for his body of work 2011: Prix de la BnF and the Prix Marguerite-Duras for his body of work 2012: Austrian State Prize for European Literature 2014: Nobel Prize in Literature