French historical novelist Patrick Modiano, who is relatively unknown outside France and whose works are centred on memory, oblivion, identify and guilt that often took place during the German occupation of World War II, has won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature. He is the eleventh writer born in France to win this prize. Apart from a long series of books, in the early 1970s, Modiano co-wrote the scripts for Lacombe Lucien, a movie directed by Louis Male focusing on French collaboration with the Nazis. Many of his fictional works are set in Paris and delve into moral dilemmas that citizens faced under the Nazi occupation. In an announcement in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy cited Mr Modiano's ability to evoke, the most ungraspable human destines in his work.
This year the Academy received 271 nominations for literature prize and had whittled the list down to 210, which included 36 first-time nominees. Eighteen members of the Academy chose a short list of five candidates whose works they studied over the summer and finally announced this name. The Academy said the award of 8 million Swedish Kronas was 'for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.'
Modiano was born in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt in July 1945, several months after the official end of Nazi occupation in the late 1944. His father, Alberto Modiano, was an Italian Jew with ties to the Gestapo and his mother was a Flemish actress named Louisa Colpeyn. Thus the complex background of the family set the scene for a lifelong obsession with that dark period in history. The eldest of two boys, Patrick spent long periods in boarding schools. His younger brother, Rudy, died in 1957 when Modiano was still a boy. When he was seventeen Modiano broke all ties with his father, who died fifteen years later and to whom he has devoted several books. Still a teenager, Modiano left school and wrote "I was not yet 20, but my memories date to before I was born." He became a household name in France during the late 1970s but never appeared comfortable before cameras and soon withdrew from the gaze of publicity which usually happens to the famous authors.
In a 2011 interview with France Today, a culture and travel journal, Modiano said, "After each novel, I have impression that I have cleared it all away. But I know I'll come back over and over again to tiny details, little things that the part of what I am. I had no diploma, no definite goal to achieve. But it is tough for a young writer to begin so early. Really, I prefer not to read my early books. Not that I don't like them, but I don't recognize myself anymore, like an old actor watching himself as a young leading man." His most famous works include "Mission Person". A story of an amnesiac who travels across the world trying to piece tighter his identity. It is his sixth novel which addresses the never-ending search for identity in a world where "the sand holds the traces of our footsteps but a few moments". He was awarded the Goncourt Prize in 1978 for it. "Dora Burder' investigates the disappearance of a young Jewish girl in 1941. At the core of this poignant novel, published in 1997, is Modiano's real-life investigation into the disappearance of a young Jewish girl, announced in a newspaper - back in 1941. Struck by this discovery, haunted by the legacy of this mysterious teenager, the author seeks out any tiny scraps of information in an effort to finally come to terms with his own lost adolescence. "Out of the Dark" is a moody, hallucinatory novel whose narrator pines after former lover who has changed her name and denies that their affair took place. A 1999 New York Times review of "Out of the Dark" described it as 'both suspenseful and contemplative.' Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Academy commented on this works thus: 'they are small books -always variations on the same theme: about memory, about loss, about identity about seeking. Along with collaborationist France, Modiano's work is haunted by what he says was a cold upbringing, creating the impression of a long letter to his parents. The writer has described his mother's heart as so cold that her lap-sized chow-chow leapt from a window to his death'.
His works have been translated into more than thirty languages to make the world know the traumas after Nazi occupation of France and Germany. A leading bookstore in Paris said after declaration of the name of Patrick as the Nobel Prize winner in literature, "It's a surprise. He has readers in France and there is always interest in his books, which sell very well. But this prize will help raise the global profile of one of our consummate writes. He is a master of writing on memory and occupation which haunt and inform his work. He is a chronicler of Paris, its streets, its past and its present. This is good news for France."
Professor Sean Hand, the head of the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Warwick said readers of Modiano "see his work as being concerned with a number of basic themes about memory, loss, identity and real ambiguities that are inherent in all of these". Much of the author's work, he said, looked at the Vichy regime in occupied France during World War Second, particularly the part it played in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels. His works must have a message for this present troubled world and the world leaders should go ahead carefully following the lessons of history.
Â
The writer is Program Manager: BRAC Education Program and Vice- President: Bangladesh English Language Teachers Association (BELTA).
Email: masumbillah65@gmail.com
The art of memory won Nobel Prize for Patrick Modiano
Masum Billah | Published: October 18, 2014 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
Share if you like