Patrick Modiano is
a bestselling novelist and the winner of some of the most prestigious literary
awards in France, including the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Mondial Cino Del
Duca for lifetime achievement. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most
ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the
occupation.”
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Praise for Books
“Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti…As good a place as any
to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano’s fiction.” —New York Times Book Review
“Modiano’s work is unknown to most North American readers, and
this is as good an introduction as any. The stories here highlight his concerns
as a chronicler of the Occupation years and the lean times leading up to 1968…Fictions with a moral bite, depicting a world in which
everyone, it seems, is complicit in crimes not yet specified. Moody, elegant, and dour.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“These three atmospheric
novellas demonstrate the range of reading pleasure afforded by Modiano’s
approach and the dark romance of his Paris…Each first-person novella is also a
portrait of the artist.” —Publishers Weekly
“Modiano’s style, plain but elliptical and carefully wrought…Unforgettable.” —Booklist
“This collection of three novellas is pure Modiano, with haunting evocations of a Paris long past. It’s a hazy blend of fiction and his own experiences as a child born at the end of the war…His sparse, beautiful prose distills a feeling and mood that remains with me.” —Cara Black, author of Murder on the Left Bank
“Haunting. Like a master
perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his
unmistakable blend of nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris.” —Damion Searls, author of The Inkblots
“Reading Modiano is
like experiencing a very specific flavor you don’t encounter every day—saffron
or asafetida, say. He’s direct and precise but also gently melancholy, like the
squeezed essence of passing time. Mark Polizzotti’s translation expertly
catches the timbre of his voice.” —Luc Sante, award-winning writer and critic
“Completely,
insouciantly, Modiano describes the interiors and essential matter of the
French literary imagination. In these fictions, the sworn bewilderment of
intimacy as cause and quest and actual topography of narrative becomes an
inexhaustible source. And from that source there flows a riverine voice of
legends and documentary legerdemain: always candid, always fitly perplexed. In
the three novellas gathered as Suspended Sentences, this voice
elapses across Paris as it never was yet somehow must have
been. Otherwise, there could be no accounting for acrobats, for Edith Piaf, for
collaboration and liberation and the spring of 1968. All of these and more
Modiano addresses with a luminous bewilderment more intimately exacting and
more precise than any certainty could be.” —Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows
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 place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers—all appear in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.
Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano's fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person's confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano's trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
