Patrick Modiano | 2014 Nobel prize in Literature

Modiano's novella "Dona Bruder" influenced me very much and helped me in my search for the story of Petri the Knife, the Monster of Galata. 
MAM

French historical author Patrick Modiano[1] has won the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature. He is the 11th Nobel literature prize winner born in France. 

At a press conference in Paris, the publicity-shy Modiano expressed his surprise at the win and said he was keen to find out why he was chosen. "I wasn't expecting it at all," he said. "It was like I was a bit detached from it all, as if a doppelganger with my name had won."

The Nobel Academy described the novelist, whose work has often focused on the Nazi occupation of France, as "a Marcel Proust of our time". The academy said the award was "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation". "This is someone who has written many books that echo off each other... that are about memory, identity and aspiration," Peter Englund, the academy's permanent secretary said.

Mavi Boncuk |

French Nobel Prize in Literature winners
For most of the 20th century, French authors had more Literature Nobel Prizes than those of any other nation.

1901 – Sully Prudhomme (The first Nobel Prize in literature)
1904 – Frédéric Mistral (wrote in Occitan)
1911 – Maurice Maeterlinck (Belgian)
1915 – Romain Rolland
1921 – Anatole France
1927 – Henri Bergson
1937 – Roger Martin du Gard
1947 – André Gide
1952 – François Mauriac
1957 – Albert Camus
1960 – Saint-John Perse
1964 – Jean-Paul Sartre (declined the prize)
1969 – Samuel Beckett (Irish, wrote in English and French)
1985 – Claude Simon
2000 – Gao Xingjian (writes in Chinese)
2008 – J.M.G. Le Clézio
2014 - Patrick Modiano

[1] Patrick Modiano  was born at the end of World War II, on July 30, 1945 in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt , several months after the official end of Nazi occupation, to a Sephardic Jewish family whose complex background set the scene for a lifelong obsession with that dark period in history. His roots originally in Italy, and his ancestors, longtime inhabitants of Thessaloniki, Greece, [*] included eminent rabbis. [**]

 His father, Alberto Modiano, was a Sephardic Italian Jew with ties to the Gestapo who did not have to wear the yellow star and who was also close to organised crime gangs. Despite his august lineage, Modiano’s father, Albert, survived the war in Paris dishonorably, as a clandestine black marketer profiting from business deals with Nazis. His mother was a Flemish actress named Louisa Colpeyn[***].

Published when he was just 22, in 1967, his first novel La place de l’etoile (The Star’s Place), was a direct reference to the mark of shame inflicted on the Jews. 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 the publishing house Éditions Gallimard. 

In 1968 he 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 while stranded in Paris during the Algerian war Modiano had asked his father for little financial assistance but his father called the police. 

The 2010 release of the German translation of La Place de l'Étoile won Modiano the German Preis der SWR-Bestenliste (Prize of the Southwest Radio Best-of List) from the Südwestrundfunk radio station, which hailed the book as a major Post-Holocaust work. The 42-year delay of the book's translation to German—surprising in that most of Modiano's works are translated to that language—is due to its highly controversial and at times satirically anti-semitic content. 

La Place de l'Étoile has not yet been published in English. In 1973, Modiano co-wrote the screenplay of Lacombe Lucien, a movie directed by Louis Malle which focuses on the involvement of a boy in the "French Gestapo" after being denied admission to the French Resistance. The movie caused controversy due to the lack of justification of the main character's political involvement. Modiano's novels all delve into the puzzle of identity, of how one can track evidence of one's existence through the traces of the past. Obsessed with the troubled and shameful period of the Occupation—during which his father had allegedly engaged in some shady dealings—Modiano returns to this theme in all of his novels, book after book building a remarkably homogeneous work. "After each novel, I have the impression that I have cleared it all away," he says. "But I know I'll come back over and over again to tiny details, little things that are part of what I am. In the end, we are all determined by the place and the time in which we were born." He writes constantly about the city of Paris, describing the evolution of its streets, its habits and its people.

In 1972, Modiano was awarded the French Academy’s Grand Prize for his novel Ring Roads (Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française for Les Boulevards de ceinture.), and the Goncourt Prize in 1978 for Missing Person (Rue des boutiques obscures). 

In 1996, he won the National Literature Grand Prize for his entire work.

Screenplays 
Lacombe, Lucien (with Louis Malle), 1973. Controversial about a teenager living under the Occupation who is rejected by the French resistance and falls in with pro-Nazi collaborators.

Bon Voyage (with Jean-Paul Rappeneau), 2003 

Adaptations of his novels 
Une jeunesse (from novel of same title) directed by Moshé Mizrahi, 1983 
Le parfum d’Yvonne (from novel Villa triste) directed by Patrice Leconte, 1994 

 

[*] The city of Thessaloniki (also known as Salonica) housed a major Jewish community, mostly of Sephardic origin, until the middle of the Second World War. It is the only known example of a city of this size in the Jewish diaspora that retained a Jewish majority for centuries. Sephardic Jews immigrated to the city following their expulsion from Spain by Christian rulers under the Alhambra Decree in 1492. This community influenced the Sephardic world both culturally and economically, and the city was nicknamed la madre de Israel (mother of Israel). 

The community experienced a "golden age" in the 16th century, when they developed a strong culture in the city. Like other groups in the Ottoman Empire, they continued to practice traditional culture during the time when western Europe was undergoing industrialization. In the middle of 19th century, Jewish educators and entrepreneurs came to Thessaloniki from Western Europe to develop schools and industries; they brought contemporary ideas from Europe that changed the culture of the city. With the development of industry, both Jewish and other ethnic populations became industrial workers and developed a large working class, with labor movements contributing to the intellectual mix of the city.

[**] Modiano ancestors resided in Modigliana, a township on the foothills of the Apennines northeast of Florence. The family name, originally Modigliano, then Modiano, describes one who comes from Modigliana. This small village northeast of Florence in Italy gave the Modianos their family name. Tuscany was the family’s springboard to Salonika. Research in Italy led Prof. Michele Luzzati of Pisa University to formulate a new theory about the origin of the Modillano/ Modiano family. In the 16th century members of the family migrated to Salonika which was then part of the Ottoman Empire. We find a family of Modillano rabbis in Salonika as early as the end of the 1500s. The most prominent among the Modianos were Saul Isaac Modiano, banker, real estate developer and philanthropist, was one of the richest, if not the richest man in 19th century Salonika in the Ottoman Empire; and his cousin Saul Daniel Modiano of Trieste whose playing cards as well as advertising posters for cigarette paper are still popular today. Source: Mario Modiano.
See research on Modianos

[***] Louisa Colpeyn (Louisa Colpijn) b. Antwerp 24/02/1918 began her film career in the Lowlands, in studios in Brussels, before the Second World War. With the onset of the conflict, she decided to go to France in June 1942, and worked for a time in dubbing studios of the German company Continental. She met Alberto Modiano in October 1942, and married in late 1944, having two children with him. In 1945 Patrick Modiano, the future writer, and in 1947 Rudy Modiano (who died of illness at 10 years) . After the war,  she resumes activity in theater and cinema, where she became specialized in the roles of beautiful mature women notably with Jacques Becker, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Berri. She played mostly supporting roles in theater, film and television. Her best films as an actor include Jan Vanderheyden's comedy Janssens tegen Peeters (1939), Veel geluk, Monika (1941) and Jean-Luc Godard's comedy-thriller Bande à part (1964).