Patrick Modiano

This fall, the 2014 Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to the French writer Patrick Modiano. By that time I had read a dozen of his novels. Modiano has a beautiful, pure language, his style combines sophistication and simplicity. But simplicity in modern literature - in French, that in English is a phenomenon rather rare.

Modiano is a prolific author, more than 20 novels, and there are also scripts (you could see Louis Malle shot according to his script “Lacob Lucien”). Once Modiano still wrote songs ( Chanson ).

To a certain extent, Patrick Modiano is a writer of one topic: this is France, who survived the German occupation. It was surviving : Modiano was born in 1945 and he writes “under the sign” of his parents and is still painful for himself.

Around, people who are not sure that they bear the name given to them at baptism, not to mention the fact that they often do not remember their parents and in general their loved ones. About other "people from the past" - but they were ! - You can only find out from the old newspaper ads about the search for the missing - Modiano wrote about this the tragically simple story “Dora Brusder” (1997).

People, their books and diaries, family albums and notebooks disappeared, names changed and new - “safe” - pedigree; The mansions, quarters, hospitals and monasteries disappeared ... Modiano returns the memory not of heroes - they wrote a lot about resistance - but about the most ordinary people, sinful, hungry, sought to survive and save their children, to protect patients and old people. The writer also reminds us of the places where these people lived not so long ago, worked, loved, betrayed ... the usual place of action for the novels of Modiano - Paris. And not at all Paris, but exactly named quarters, streets, bridges, cafes; Scrupulously outlined houses, balconies, panoramas. And all descriptions are surprisingly concise - Modiano’s novel, as a rule, fits 150 pages.

On Russian -speaking sites you can read that Modiano was born "in a prosperous family." This is not true. Patrick Modiano’s mother was, as they say, “actress without an engagement” - often she had no work at all, although there were good seasons. His father was a Jew from the Sephardi family. However, he did not register as a Jew, and as a result hid, lived under other people's names, engaged in small commercial transactions, sometimes successful, more often doubtful.

So the point is not that the Modiano family was not “prosperous” - Patrick simply did not have a family in the usual sense of the word. Neither Patrick nor his younger brother, who died early Rudy, were the desired children. Both the mother and the father changed the “satellites” and “companions”, and Patrick sent them to study in different, by no means first -rate educational institutions with boarding schools, where he was starving and sick with scabies.

Yes, it happened that the father or mother took Patrick with them somewhere, but mostly the children grew up in other cities with the next nanny or in the family sheltered for money. In the autobiographical story “The genealogy”, Patrick learns from his father about the completely unexpected death of his brother from acute leukemia, as it were, by the way, in the car. Modiano began to read serious books early, managed to successfully pass the exam for a bachelor, signed up for a sorbonne, but did not attend lectures. He realized his calling for a long time, which contributed to the acquaintance with the famous writer Remon Kueneau, who would later witness at his wedding.

... In the Nobel lecture, Modiano talked about what unconditional imprint he leaves his time on the writer, even if it seems to us that the author is a hermit and lives in the notorious ivory tower.

As an example, he quotes the poems of Jets “White Swans in KULE” (I bring them translated by Anna Blaise, www.weavenworld.ru/a/c33/i62 ):

... Autumn went down for the nineteenth time
Since I opened the score​​​
And , having lost his account , he froze , stunned
With booby strokes wing
When they soared after another ,​
In circles, soaring upward .
...
But now they have been clothed in an individual ,
Mysterious beauty .
In which reeds they pose the nests ,
Where will the peace be found
Whose gaze will be killed when the new dawn
He will tell me that they are no longer there ?

Similar feelings, according to Modiano, he experienced, flipping through old Parisian telephone reference books with numbers that no one would respond. He was embraced by the awareness of some guilt before their without a trace that disappeared, prompted to later tell about these people.

In this regard, Modiano quotes (translated into English) that once struck him Mandelstam's poems:

I returned to my city , familiar to tears ...

As we see, the poetic addictions of Patrick Modiano reflect not only his aesthetics, but also his ethics.

Patrika Modiano was translated into Russian by masters as Juliana Yakhnina and Maria Zonina. So read, you will not regret it.