Modiano wins Nobel in literature

French literary glory in the tradition of Nobel Prize-winners Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus has once again been recognized. Patrick Modiano, a French writer whose sullen, pithy and illusory novels were mostly set during the Nazi occupation of France, won 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature last Thursday (October 09). Literary critics have hailed Modiano as modern Marcel Proust, a French novelist of the 19th century. Their works resonate with one another thematically.
Patrick Modiano was born in a west Paris suburb two months after the Second World War ended in Europe in July 1945. Nazi occupation of France strongly influenced his works that are mostly about identity, about memory, about time, about alienation, about seeking truth in the midst of mysteries and, most importantly, about World War ll. In his novels, as literary critics have often noted, Modiano has returned time and again to the same premise: the unfathomable pull of the past, the threat of disappearance, the blurring of moral boundaries, and the dark side of the soul.
Patrick Modiano is the 15th French person to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. He has been named 111th winner of this distinction in literature. But he is not much popular with the non-French-speaking readers.
English-speaking book lovers are alos scratching their heads as very few of Modiano's works have been translated into English. Only about half a dozen of his works in French that have been translated into English are now mostly out of print. And perhaps none in English is available in electronic edition.
English-speaking American and British readers may gripe at the selection of a strange writer who doesn't write in English. But, awarding this year's prestigious prize for literary feat to a little-known writer has some positive implications for those who write their stories in their mother tongues. Such selection helps introduce gifted authors to a wider audience.
There are billions of people outside the English-speaking world. Among those billions are many fine authors who in some cases don't write in English. They must not remain in obscurity.
Now that Modiano is a Nobel laureate new readers of his works would come to learn about a hidden genius newly discovered -- if the Swedish Academy rightly awarded the best available writer for his right works and if other nominated works were deemed not as brilliant.
The Swedish Academy, often criticised for Eurocentric attitude in its selection, has however earned a reputation of swinging between very popular and powerful writers on one hand and the unsung and unfamiliar ones on the other. Peter Mikael Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, admitted that there was some truth to such criticisms. He told the Associated Press in 2009: "I think that is a problem. We tend to relate more easily to literature written in Europe and in the European tradition."  Swedish Academy's previous Permanent Secretary, Horace Engdahl, also once responded to the same criticism saying: "The purpose of the prize is to make them famous, not to tap them when they are already famous."
Well, the Academy's penchant for unsung geniuses sounds interesting for the writers who write in their own languages. About one hundred years back Bengali was a language almost completely unknown to the West. It was Rabindranath Tagore who heralded to the world about the existence of Bengali, a powerful language, by winning Nobel back in 1913.
The Academy is not as parochial as some English-speaking critics are often heard of saying. Writers outside of Europe like Peruvian-born Mario Vargas Llosa (2010), Chinese novelist Mo Yan (2012) and Canadian short-story writer Alice Munro (2013) have also won the same award. Of course, the Literature Nobel Prize has often been controversial. Many admired writers like Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce have never won the prize, while some not-so-known authors have.
Serious readers of many famous living writers must have found their hearts broken not finding one of their favourite writers winning the medal this time.
Those who have read the works of Haruki Murakami, the Japanese author, must be wondering whether judges of the Academy could get the real taste and depth of Colorless Tsukuru and His Years of Pilgrimage, his 13th novel, or Men Without Women, his fourth book of short stories. Murakami, who has been writing four hours a day without fail for the last 35 years, may not yet be a Nobel laureate, but this 65-year-old author's numerous brilliant works demand to be read. Judges of the Swedish Academy, before they choose the next year's laureate, should reread, if they haven't yet read thoroughly, his other sterling works: Norwegian Wood (1987), The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (1994), and Kafka on the Shore (2002), to cite a few.
Nobel Prize has also eluded the great Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o yet again. Literary pundits have long touted Ngugi as the frontrunner for the Nobel Prize. This is the second time the prestigious prize has not gone to Ngugi. He was expected to bag it in 2010 but lost it to Mario Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist.
Ngugi through his illuminating writings wanted to liberate ordinary people from their passivity and overhaul the general bourgeois education system in Kenya and was subsequently imprisoned for over a year as the Kenyan regime found his works as a threat to their authoritarian rule.
This year's winner Modiano with more than 30 books and screenplays to his name is a prolific writer. He is a well-known writer in France for his hypnotic prose style that has drawn his French readers into a rare literary experience. Undoubtedly a great literary figure, Patrick Modiano verily deserved the 2014 Nobel in Literature. He previously won the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature, the 2010 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca from the Institut de France for lifetime achievement, the 1978 Prix Goncourt for Rue des boutiques obscures, and the 1972 Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française for Les Boulevards de ceinture. His works have been celebrated in and around France, though only a few have been in circulation in English by the time he has been awarded the Nobel Prize.
There is hardly a novel written by a great author and subsequently translated into English that is not available in electronic edition for easy reading at a lesser cost. However, after searching in vain to find an electronic edition of his famous novel Missing Person, the winner of the Prix Goncourt (France's premier literary prize), I had to buy from Amazon a paperback of the elegant novel, a detective thriller, that portrays a man in pursuit of his identity that he lost in the murky days of the Paris Occupation, the black hole of French memory. I, like many readers, have to wait for a while to read and know the newly minted Nobel laureate.
 Missing Person by Patrick Modiano was translated into English by Daniel Weissbort that was published in 1980. The story follows a man named Guy Roland as he attempts to recover his repressed past and identity in the years after the Paris Occupation. One sentence excerpted from Missing Person: "I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop; the shower had started when Hutte left me."
Anything great that happens in this world has controversy. And awarding Nobel Prize has always been hailed and criticised by admirers and critics.

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