Patrick Modiano bags 2014 Nobel prize in
Literature
Indrasena
Kancharla
While the ways of God remain
mysterious, the Swedish Academy Nobel Committee’s judgements often baffle many
intellectuals. The Swedish Academy chose to honour the 69 year old French novelist Patrick Modiano with
the award of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature bypassing the claims of more
deserving and better known writers like
the Kenyan born writer-activist Ngugi wa Thiong’o and the Japanese writer Haruki
Murakami.
South African Doris Lessing (Nobel
Prize winner of 2007 for Literature)responded irreverently to the announcement
of the Nobel Committee’s award of the Prize to her saying that it was rather too late. On the
contrary, Modiano’s immediate response to the announcement of the Nobel Prize
to him on 9th October, 2014, is in terms of total disbelief. He
said, “ I didn’t expect it at all.”
According to the spokesperson of the
Swedish Academy, Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize “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 suburb of
Paris in 1945 to a Jewish-Italian businessman Albert Modiano and a Belgian
actress, Louisa Colpijn. He married Dominique Zehrfuss in 1970, and they have
two daughters Zina and Marie. The Nobel Laureate declared that he would
dedicate the Prize to his three-year old grandson as the latter happens to be a
Swedish national.
The public shy author who shuns
interviews maintains, “I do read English pretty well, I can’t speak it. It is
difficult for me.” Only about half a dozen of his novels are available in
English translation, and he is known only in limited circles in the USA and the
UK and almost unfamiliar in most parts of the world including literary circles.
He authored about 30 books most of which are novels. His novels are very brief
and they are in the range of about 125 pages. He also wrote children’s books
and film scripts.
Modiano’s novels are deeply
entrenched in the “trauma of the Nazi occupation” of France and his own
neglected childhood. When he sought his father’s help for the publication of
his first novel, the former called the police. It was a rude shock to him. He
has been able to capture imaginatively the trauma of the ordinary French people
during the War. Modiano’s first novel, La Place de l’etoile, (The Star’s Place), published in 1968, is an indictment of the holocaust, the brutal
killing of the Jews by Hitler. Since then he has been publishing novel after
novel almost once in every two years. The English title of his latest novel
published in 2014 is “So you don’t get lost in the neighbourhood.”
Modiano is obsessively concerned in
his novels with the issues of Germany’s occupation of France during World
war-II, the evolution of Paris since the end of the War, and the Algerian war
of Independence. Moreover, his focus is on ‘memory’, ‘oblivion’, ‘guilt’, ‘identity and loss’ in the post-War
scenario. The locale of his literary
world is Paris itself although his characters often “try to dodge real or
perceived threats by escaping to the French Riviera or Switzerland.”
His literary productions span four
decades and a half. Some of his novels available in English translation are:
Night Rounds(1969/1971), Ring Roads (1972/1974), Missing Person (1978/1980),
Memory Lane(1981), A Trace of Malice (1984/1988), Honeymoon (1990/1992), Out of
the Dark (1998), Dora Bruder (1997/1999) as The Search Warrant (2000). Although
some of his novels won for him literary fame and a few awards, his “Missing
Person” sold less than 2500 copies in the USA.
Modiano’s fictional corpus draws
heavily from his own “autobiographical
foundation.” He is also known for collecting materials for his works from interviews,
articles in newspapers and his own jottings of several decades. His novel “Dora
Bruder” is structured on the sordid story of a teen ager Dora Bruder, a
holocaust victim in Paris. The novel was translated in to English as
“Search Warrant.” The novelist’s quest for Dora Bruder, the 15 year old girl
victim of the holocaust, is in terms of his recurring ‘memory’ motif.
Patrick Modiano admits often that he was
writing the same book year after year because of his inescapable obsession with
the recurrent theme of the Nazi occupation of France during the War and the
impact of the psychic wounds of the holocaust on the Jews.
Modiano is curious to go to Stockholm
to accept the Nobel honour in December, 2014. He is not free from ‘stage fear’
if he is required to address public meetings. Answering the query whether he would
deliver a speech on the great occasion, he remarked: “As long as it is about
reading a prepared text, that doesn’t scare me.”
Peter Englund, the permanent
secretary of the Swedish Academy, himself observed in a post-announcement
interview that people outside France do not know much about Patrick Modiano or his
work. He maintains: “He is well known in France, but not anywhere else.” By
virtue of the award of the 2014 Noble Prize in Literature, Patrick Modaino is
bound to acquire the status of an international celebrity since “nothing
succeeds like success.”
The writer, Professor of English and
Dean Faculty of Arts, (Retired), Kakatiya University, Warangal), can be reached
at <indrapapa@yahoo.com>
