The Occupation Trilogy by Patrick Modiano - review

Nobel-winner’s novels are a struggle, says Johanna Thomas-Corr

Mature style: Patrick Modiano

AFP/Getty Images

13 August 2015

Last Autumn the Nobel Academy announced that the recipient of its 2014 prize for literature would be the French novelist Patrick Modiano. The permanent secretary, Peter Englund, declared the 69-year-old author to be a modern-day Proust, whose “art of memory… has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”. Most English-speaking readers will have responded with a baffled “who?”

Born in 1945 to a Jewish-Italian father and a Belgian mother, Modiano is not widely known outside his native France; even there his slippery, dark stories are regarded as an acquired taste. Most of Modiano’s work is unavailable in Britain, but Bloomsbury has redressed the balance by publishing The Occupation Trilogy: three early novellas set in France under the Nazi occupation written between 1968 and 1972.

Inspired by the mystery of Modiano’s own father, Albert — who refused to wear the yellow star and spent the war as a black marketeer doing business with the Gestapo — they congregate around the same themes of complicity, identity and memory, as introspective young narrators find their way in a shadowy world of venal men and coarse women thriving in the chaos of war.

La Place de L’Etoile was published in 1968, when the reassuring idea that France had been a nation of resisters was looking shaky. Here, a clever, amoral young Jew named Raphaël Schlemilovitch projects himself into the recent past, before his birth, to become an anti-semitic collaborator.

The other two novels are more even in tone and more typical of Modiano’s mature style. The Night Watch turns into a noir-ish account of a double agent flickering between a resistance cell and the French Gestapo. In Ring Roads, a young man tracks down his lost father, only to find the overweight Jew is living out the war with a dissolute group of criminals.

While the ghosts of the French Occupation haunt the pages, these are really tales of young men trying to establish life boundaries — where can they stray, how far can they trespass, who can they pretend to be? “It was myself I was hunting down so relentlessly,” concludes the narrator of Ring Roads.

Still, the ideas behind Modiano’s writing are more seductive than the reality of ploughing through his stories. There are many pages that I had to read several times to understand and I’m not sure this trilogy merits the effort.

Go to eveningstandard.ca/booksdirect to buy this book for £14.99, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

MORE ABOUT

Patrick Modiano

France

The Occupation Trilogy by Patrick Modiano - review

Read More