The strange world of Nobel Prize Laureate Patrick Modiano.
Patrick Modiano, the 69 years old French writer who was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature on October 9, has been compared on two accounts to Marcel Proust, the early 20th century French novelist.
Like Proust, he chiefly devoted his writings to an obsessional quest for things past. Like Proust, he is of partial Jewish descent (albeit on his father’s side, while Proust stemmed from Jews on his mother’s side) ; and the intertwinned topics of Jewishness, antisemitism and of social or moral ambivalence at the core of his works.
The author of no less than thirty novels and nine screenplays, Modiano became instantly famous at the age of 22 with La Place de l’Etoile, a hazy tale about the Paris night life under the German occupation and interlope Jews managing to hide among gangsters and pro-Nazi collaborationists. The title is an untranslatable French pun meaning both the Arch of Triumph square in Paris and the place on jackets and other clothes where Jews were requested to wear a yellow star.
Acclaimed as a masterpiece, La Place de l’Etoile won two prestigious literary prizes in a row : Prix Roger Nimier and Prix Fénéon. Modiano was to be awarded many more prizes througout his carreer, including the French Academy Grand Prize in 1972, the Goncourt Prize in 1978 and the Austran State Prize for European Literature in 2012.
Modiano’s fiction is usually based on the unsavory case of his own father, Albert Modiano, a French half-Jewish gangster and con man, who allegedly worked for SD, the Nazi secret police, in order to escape arrest and deportation to the death camps. Later books dwell on the author’s childhood, an almost Dickensian tale of lecherous divorced parents and squale boarding schools run by sadistic teachers. Many critics have suspected many details, both regarding Modiano’s father and his childhood, to be deliberately inflated or made up for aesthetic purposes.
Modiano seems to owe a lot to Raymond Queneau, one of the main directors at the Gallimard publishing house in Paris, and an accomplished writer on his own right. Queneau, whose wife was Jewish, may have advised him to discard easy antisemitic clichés even when writing about immoral Jews or half-Jews. More importantly, he taught him to stick to a classic, sober, style instead of kowtowing to more « modern » literary trends. Retrospectively, this may have been the key to his enduring success.
By many standards, Modiano can be seen as a more riveting writer than the most recent French Nobel Prize laureates : Claude Simon (1985), Gao Xingjian (2000) and Jean-Marie Le Clézio (2008). On the other hand, such earlier laureates like André Gide (1947), Albert Camus (1957), Saint-John Perse (1960), Jean-Paul Sartre (1964), or Samuel Beckett (1969) were probably of a much higher standing. He can aptly be compared, as a fine stylist, to François Mauriac (1952).
The Nobel Prize eluded many of the best 20th century French writers : Marcel Proust, Paul Claudel, Victor Segalen (who was everything Le Clezio is not), André Breton, Paul Morand, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Pierre-Jean Jouve, Eugène Ionesco, Henri Michaux, Alain Robbe-Grillet (far superior to Simon).
C’est la vie.
© Michel Gurfinkiel, 2014
Michel Gurfinkiel is the Founder and President of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Institute, a conservative think-thank in France, and a Shillman/Ginsburg Fellow at Middle East Forum.