2014 Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to Patrick Modiano

October 9, 2014 4:17 AM

2014 Nobel Prize in Literature Goes to Patrick Modiano who is a French novelist and memoir writer. This article from 2011 is a good overview over his career and life. He was born in Italy to a Jewish father and a Belgian mother. Much of his writing deals with recent Jewish history such as in the book Dora Bruder. His detective novel Missing Person, which won the Prix Goncourt in 1978, has been called a postmodern mystery novel.
posted by Kattullus (27 comments total)

Interview with Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, about Modiano (in English).
posted by Kattullus at 5:00 AM on October 9, 2014

Somewhere, Haruki Murakami is stroking a cat, looking wistfully into the middle distance. Then the cat says "Buck up, you're a lock for next year."
posted by Cash4Lead at 5:29 AM on October 9, 2014 [9 favorites]

It's above my pay grade, but I'd not have picked this one in a month of Tuesdays. I read some of his work in the '90s and found it, well, unremarkable. Fair play to him and all, but it left no lasting impression, and formally was more or less without interest. The fault is without doubt all mine.
posted by Wolof at 5:58 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Somewhere, Haruki Murakami is running an ultra marathon. Someone will tell him. He'll be fine.
posted by Fizz at 6:16 AM on October 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

Related: Nonfiction Deserves a Nobel
posted by Cash4Lead at 6:32 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Fair play to him and all, but it left no lasting impression, and formally was more or less without interest.

Well, really, doesn't this describe most Nobel-winning literature? I mean, Winston Churchill won this prize. Prudhomme was the inaugural winner. Most of the time, I feel like they throw a dart at a map and choose the winner from the nearest country.
posted by sonic meat machine at 6:39 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

I read some of his work in the '90s and found it, well, unremarkable.

Modiano's writing is a lot like looking at an old photograph of yourself and wondering who that person was.

I think he's brilliant but I also see what you mean by unremarkable, my only advice for enjoying him would be to think of that 'unremarkableness' as a quality, not a flaw. A lot of being is unremarkable.
posted by litleozy at 7:22 AM on October 9, 2014 [6 favorites]

A lot of being is unremarkable.

Which is why we read books...
posted by chavenet at 7:37 AM on October 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

was really hoping this was archimboldi's year.
posted by JimBennett at 7:40 AM on October 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

Well, really, doesn't this describe most Nobel-winning literature?

Oh my gosh, no. In my experience, one of the best ways to read something really, really good is to pick up a book by someone you've never heard of who won the Nobel Prize. This is how I got to read Haldor Laxness and Ivo Andric and Par Lagerkvist.
posted by escabeche at 8:09 AM on October 9, 2014 [4 favorites]

A lot of being is unremarkable.

Which is why we read books...

You're confusing unremarkable with uninteresting
posted by litleozy at 8:18 AM on October 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

You're confusing unremarkable with uninteresting.

Well, what's the difference?
posted by Termite at 8:32 AM on October 9, 2014

I have given up on Atwood, but I keep hoping for Adonis, and I don't quite know why he hasn't gotten in. I also think that the Nobel because a kind of moral didactic-ism is required as part of the project, is not good with post-structural formal innovation, and I kind of think the 19th century novel died somewhere around Flaubert, and they still want naturalism. I've read this guys dectective book, and some of hsi memoirs, and i wasn't in love.
posted by PinkMoose at 8:36 AM on October 9, 2014

Well, really, doesn't this describe most Nobel-winning literature?

Certainly it's a commonplace that the Nobels screamingly failed to award most of the very best writers of the 20th century: Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just three.
posted by shivohum at 8:48 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Then the cat says "Buck up, you're a lock for next year."

And adds, kindly, "Your ears look especially nice today. For a human."
posted by yoink at 8:51 AM on October 9, 2014 [4 favorites]

I've been making my through Pulitzer and National Book Award winners - what are some international fiction prizes better than the Nobel?
posted by stinkfoot at 9:40 AM on October 9, 2014

Booker Prize is probably the best place to start.
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:17 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Man Booker
Giller
Governor General

Related wikipedia.
posted by Fizz at 10:24 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

The general bafflement of the English-speaking Internet's reaction this morning has been really amusing. Not to say that Modiano wasn't a dark horse, but the general tenor is still really unconsciously weird and parochial and strangely affronted, and full of arguments from ignorance.

New-"journalism" darling Vox, just for instance, is running this hilariously dumb explainer in which some important questions under "everything you need to know about Modiano" are "why isn't he Philip Roth?" and "what is the Nobel Prize?" Just frantically, comically fumbling to cover for not having read any of his work while their linkbait priorities require them to fake it and just go ahead and Voxsplain anyhow.

It's the weirdest reaction I can remember since Le Clézio, at least; maybe there's an element of specific Francophobia to it, a Freedom Fries cultural hangover.
posted by RogerB at 10:44 AM on October 9, 2014 [4 favorites]

Un site pour lire entre les lignes de Patrick Modiano: Le Réseau Modiano
posted by Mister Bijou at 10:52 AM on October 9, 2014 [1 favorite]

Next year. Next year is my year. Sob.
posted by goatdog at 11:04 AM on October 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

New "journalism" darling Vox, just for instance, is running this hilariously dumb explainer in which some important questions under "everything you need to know about Modiano" are "why isn't he Philip Roth?" and "what is the Nobel Prize?"

I just read that piece and really can't see anything wrong with it. It assumes that most of their readers won't have read Modiano, but that seems a reasonable assumption. There's no hint of outrage that Modiano won, just an attempt to explain the nature of his work and why the Nobel committee chose to recognize it. The "Philip Roth" bit isn't, at all, saying "OMG, it's an outrage that Modiano won rather than Roth!"--it's just explaining Roth's peculiar history with the Nobel prize committee and why it is that his name keeps coming up in US discussions of the Nobel. In fact it goes on to point out that there's no reason to assume Roth is any more worthy of the prize than any of a number of other US writers.

You're assuming a certain steretypical parochialism must characterize US responses and confirmation bias is doing the rest.
posted by yoink at 11:22 AM on October 9, 2014 [3 favorites]

Wolof: It's above my pay grade, but I'd not have picked this one in a month of Tuesdays.

Yeah, I have friends who're cold on him and others who love him. He isn't as universally respected as Le Clézio among those people I know who read lots of French literature, but I have friends who love him.

shivohum: Certainly it's a commonplace that the Nobels screamingly failed to award most of the very best writers of the 20th century: Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov, to name just three.

Well, famously Proust and Joyce were never nominated and the Swedish Academy can't give the award to writers who no one nominates. Nabokov is a bigger omission, as he was nominated several times. There's an extensive network of people who can nominate authors, largely made up of professors of literature, as well as previous winners and other people who read lots of books but have no direct financial interest in who wins. However, there have been some writers who, in retrospect, should have been included. However, in the 20th Century there were probably five hundred authors who were good enough to get a Nobel Prize but they give out (most of the time) only one per year. So there are inevitably going to be some terrible omissions.

On the other hand, their hit rate is really impressive, especially after the first quarter-century or so. Sure, there are some duds, but on the whole it's a very good list.

stinkfoot: what are some international fiction prizes better than the Nobel?

I'd recommend looking at the list of Nobel laureates and check some that seem interesting. Start from the newest, as the Swedish Academy was figuring what the hell it was doing for the first quarter century or so, though there are some greats among the early winners. However, the Nobel Prize rewards a body of work, not individual books, so if you're looking for individual book recommendations, the Best Translated Book Award is a very good place to start. The shortlists are always very, very strong. Also, the books are generally reasonably easy to find.
posted by Kattullus at 11:40 AM on October 9, 2014 [2 favorites]

J.P. Smith's article about learning to read French, Speaking in Tongues, is worth reading in full, but this bit about Modiano is very interesting and piqued me interest in reading him further:

I began to learn French with a few grammar books bought at Heffer’s Booksellers in Cambridge, and after several months began to read some simple stories, graduating to Candide and Tartarin de Tarascon by Alphonse Daudet, and then moving on to more contemporary writers. I started with Patrick Modiano’s first novel, La Place de l’étoile. All I knew of Modiano was that he wrote about his past and that of his parents, which was intricately bound up with the years of the German Occupation of France, a topic I was about to introduce into my own fiction. Modiano’s true subject, I discovered, is the nature of identity and memory as it’s distilled through the past—in itself a Proustian conceit—and what I find fascinating about him is that his many novels, which take up a good portion of a bookshelf, in a way are like individual chapters of one book. His theme is unchanging; his style, “la petite musique,” as the French say, is virtually the same from book to book. There is nothing “big” about his work, and readers have grown accustomed to considering each succeeding volume as an added chapter to an ongoing literary project. His twenty-five published novels rarely are longer than 200 pages, and in them his characters, who seem to drift, under different names, into first this novel, then another, wander the streets of Paris looking for a familiar place, a remembered face, some link to their elusive past, some ghost from a half-remembered encounter that might shed some light on one’s history. Phone numbers and addresses are dredged up from the past, only to bring more cryptic clues and, if not dead ends, then the kind of silence that hides a deeper and more painful truth.

You open the latest Modiano and you know exactly where you are. The writer is artistically all of a piece. It’s his obsession with memory and the haunted lives of his protagonists which truly caught my attention, and especially how he returns time and again to mine this subject. As someone with a very broken chronology, with a memory of childhood that is in many ways unreliable (how much has been planted there? How much of it is real? What’s been removed by doubt or by someone else’s will?), I saw in Modiano how the capriciousness of memory can in itself become the subject of a novel. And because back then I found plot a troublesome thing to handle in my fiction, the idea of creating a narrator in search of a story became the basis for my first novel. I sent Modiano a copy of it when it was published and, not surprisingly, heard nothing back.

posted by Kattullus at 1:08 PM on October 9, 2014 [5 favorites]

Oh god has it really been a year since the Munro announcement?
posted by erlking at 2:12 PM on October 9, 2014

Other international awards worth tracking include the Man Booker International, not to be confused with the regular Booker. MBI is like the Nobel, in that it's given to an author in recognition of their whole body of work. Recent winners include Lydia Davis (who I consider Nobel-worthy!)
posted by erlking at 2:15 PM on October 9, 2014

Here are some of my favorite articles published (or republished) since the announcement that Modiano will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

J. xx Drancy. 13/8/42 by Michael Wood (the strange title is explained in the article) is an essay in the London Review of Books from 2000. Excerpt:

Much recurs in Modiano’s work, then, and the range is not vast. But the novels I’ve read – the recent ones – are subtly, even insidiously different from each other. You think you know where you are, because the places are similar and the natives look alike. This is an error, because they are all about loss, and scrupulously, painfully remind us that no two losses are the same. Chien de printemps reports a fragment of the story of Francis Jansen, a Belgian photographer, friend and protégé of Robert Capa, who works for the Magnum agency, and has disappeared. A young man, our narrator, meets Jansen (‘when I was 19’) and offers to sort and catalogue his work. Jansen is friendly, but aloof, distracted, avoiding all his old friends, not answering the telephone, hiding from visitors. He is plainly living in the aftermath of some calamity but we never find out what it is. We learn that he loves the silence of photographs, and dislikes the talkiness of words. Of all the characters of print, he says he likes best the three dots that mark an ellipsis, but perhaps he is making a joke the narrator doesn’t get.

Patrick Modiano: an appreciation of the Nobel prize in literature winner by English author Rupert Thomson. Excerpt:

His slender masterpiece, Honeymoon, begins in a shadowy Milan hotel on a hot August afternoon. Standing at the bar, Jean B discovers that a woman he used to know took her own life in the hotel only two days before. Later, Jean goes to ground in the Parisian suburbs in an attempt to uncover the circumstances both of her death and her life. The character who vanishes is himself obsessed with a vanishing. This hall-of-mirrors effect is typical Modiano. He captures an amoral, often louche, and always ambiguous, world – a world of uncertain identities and hidden agendas. Modiano exploits all forms of genre, stealing from the spy novel and detective fiction – film noir too. But what seems to interest him most is the gaps in people's lives – the bits that have been removed or repressed, the bits that can't be accounted for.

Patrick Modiano, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, is a paradox by Akane Kawakami, senior lecturer in French literature at Birkbeck College, London. Excerpt:

His prose also achieves a difficult feat, which is to get French readers to face, time and time again, the unspeakable acts of betrayal and cowardice perpetuated during the Occupation. The detective novel framework, the clear style, the diffident narrators — all this makes it deceptively simple for readers to occupy the narrator’s seat in Modiano’s novels. The narrator of “Missing Person” introduces himself saying, “I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the cafe terrace.”

How Patrick Modiano mined his dysfunctional childhood to create a haunting body of work by the above-mentioned J. P. Smith. Excerpt:

In his autobiography, “Pedigree,” Modiano describes his, to put it mildly, dysfunctional upbringing. His mother was the Belgian actress Louisa Colpeyn (who, among many other movies and television programs, was in Godard’s “Band of Outsiders”); his father, Albert Modiano, who was part Jewish, spent the years of the Occupation working in the black market, associating with known collaborators, evading—by a hair—being captured and interned by the Nazis, a story Modiano tells in “Dora Bruder,” a work that straddles fiction and nonfiction, and whose origins are in a small notice published in a newspaper during the Occupation. A fifteen-year-old Jewish girl named Dora Bruder is declared missing by her family, and Modiano undertakes to learn her fate, and in so doing, to give her a new kind of life in his pages. But her life, and that of his father, intersect.

How to Win the Nobel Prize by Dan Piepenbring. Excerpt:

Reading the news about Patrick Modiano today, I was struck by the insipidness of the Nobel Foundation’s citation: “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” It bears all the hallmarks of an overblown blurb, one of those in which a bold, gimlet-eyed novelist is elucidating the now, or a limpid, singular poet is saying the unsayable. (Very few poets are saying the sayable these days, if our blurbs are to be believed.)

Let’s unpack this citation, beginning with this business about “the art of memory,” which doesn’t seem like much of an art to me. (To conceive of it as such invites a corny geriatric punch line: “Just wait till you start forgetting so much!”) Granting that it is art, is it really the art through which Modiano “evokes”? That would have to be his writing. If he’d simply sat at his desk lost in memories, he wouldn’t evoke much more than his own sighs. For that matter—can one really “evoke” a destiny, and, having been evoked, is that destiny still “ungraspable,” let alone the most ungraspable? Who’s to say that one destiny can be grasped more easily than another? (“He was destined to be a pediatric podiatrist—he saw it plain as day.”) Then there’s this murky concept of the “life-world,” which sounds like something out of Heidegger—wouldn’t one word or the other have sufficed? To speak of a life-world implies its negative, the death-world, which, despite our best efforts, has never been uncovered.

Drafting these citations must be painstaking, fairly joyless work. This one, at least, reads like an act of circumlocution by committee; the choice to append “the most” to “ungraspable” may have occasioned hours of debate. And for what? The final result could apply to anyone; in the broadest terms, not just every writer but every person in history has practiced the art of memory, evoking destinies and uncovering life-worlds.

And finally, The Times Literary Supplement republished a number of its old reviews of Modiano's work.
posted by Kattullus at 2:15 PM on October 13, 2014 [1 favorite]