"His work awakens memories of the most elusive human destiny and captures the lives of ordinary people during the occupation of France in World War II." This is the speech given by the Swedish Academy to Patrick Modiano, the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. And according to the 69-year-old French writer himself, he is actually "writing the same book in an intermittent way." "He has spent nearly half a century of writing, repeatedly identifying the same theme—throwing long threads like Proust in the labyrinth of memory, searching for scattered identities, histories, and forgotten fragments.
Grass of the Night is a 2012 novel by Modiano that will be translated and published in Chinese mainland. As he says in the novel, a man walking alone, the long river of time will occasionally open an opening for him. And this work also opens an opening for us to enter the personal world of Modiano.
It's easy to get to know the new Nobel Laureate in Literature, Patrick Modiano. Because from his nearly 30 works, even his amazing photos, the same face is repeated, with the same persistent and confused look.
But it couldn't be more difficult to understand Modiano. For half a century, he used each book to construct a mirror and then search for lost identities and memories in a labyrinth of cascading mirrors. The question of "who am I?" is a handsome 69-year-old man who is still pursuing it to this day.
Patrick Modiano was born on July 30, 1945, in the southern suburbs of Paris. His father was a Jew and his mother was a Belgian actor, and the two met and fell in love with each other in German-occupied France during World War II. Reluctant to wear a yellow badge of Jewish identity, his father engaged in black market trade during the war and was in frequent contact with the Gestapo. Modiano's questions and explorations about his personal identity, and his relationship with his surroundings and society, come from his father, whose wartime experience has become a recurring motif in his works. The protagonists of Modiano's writing are mostly Jews, stateless people, and wanderers like their fathers, like rootless pings, carrying the heavy pressure of war or society, struggling for their fate.
In addition to the obsession with identity and history, the strong nostalgia complex in Modiano's works, as the Nobel Prize for Literature speech put it, "awakens the memory of the most elusive human destiny", is related to the early death of his brother. Modiano once explained that he loved to pursue the same woman in his work because "the person who was once intimate with you is as blurred as a photograph that may be eclipsed by the mold and oblivion of time." His real focus is on forgetting, not memory.
Since the publication of Virgo's "Place de la Star" in 1968, Modiano has been active in the French literary scene and is deeply loved by readers. French critics unanimously recognized him as one of the most talented writers in France today.
Main works New book "Grass of the Night"
Grass of the Night is a new work published by Patrick Modiano in 2012 and is his 27th work. In the evaluation of the writer Sylvie Germain, this is another colorful "splendid ornament" woven by him "half dreaming and half waking", with "memory and forgetting, fragments of reality and the light of fantasy", which is another charming island that emerges from his "archipelago-style writing".
The story takes place in the turbulent paris of the 1960s. The protagonist Jean is a young writer, he and a mysterious woman named Dany in the university town know, acquaintance, love, the two walk the streets of Paris together, clubbing, reading, visiting the theater, to the country house vacation, spend a short, uneasy but warm, pleasant time together, but the good times are not long, Dany accidentally involved in a "dirty business", in order to avoid the police, she suddenly disappeared from Jean's life without a trace. 40 years later, the protagonist travels up the river of time to pursue the charming girl who is deeply in his memory, in his dreams, in his life, and finally learns some of Dany's little-known secrets with the help of detective Langler...
Famous work "Star Square"
Modiano's famous work, published in 1968. The story tells that rafael Šlemilovich, a young Man of Jewish descent, struggled to find his identity, setting out along the six avenues of the Star Square, trying to retrieve the roots of the Jews and find their habitat, but entered a nightmare and was finally executed on the "Star Square". It can be said that it is this "root-seeking" experience that cruelly presents the rootless fate of the Jews. The work won the Roger Niehané Prize and later the Feneon Prize. It has been controversial and was not translated into German until 42 years after its publication, and there is still no English translation.
Goncourt Literary Prize "Dark Shop Street"
It was published in 1978 and won the Goncourt Prize for Literature that year. After the protagonist of the story loses his memory, with the help of his experience as an assistant detective, he tries to search for various clues and investigate his own life. These fragments include the protagonist's personal experiences, survey reports from other places, correspondence between friends, and pictures of the protagonist's past life. The novel is composed of 47 fragments, which are both interconnected and relatively independent, which together form the structure of the entire novel.
"New Fables" "Crash in the Middle of the Night"
Crash in the Middle of the Night, published in 2003. The story is based on the protagonist's search for the owner of the vehicle that caused the accident, Jacqueline Bossel jean, and the process of searching is also a process of memory, and the protagonist thinks about the past through many fragments of memory, connecting fragments of early life. Eventually, he found Jacqueline Bosserjean and everything was calm again. This novel has the characteristics of a typical "new allegorical school", reflecting the author's consistent writing style - there is no specific plot, no clear answer, and no value judgment containing moral content, but only with the help of fragments, in a fictional and imaginary way, in front of the reader to create a confusing, confusing world between virtual reality, reality and the past.
Excerpt from Grass of the Night
Translated by Jin Longge
But I'm not dreaming. Sometimes, inadvertently, I hear myself saying this on the street, but the sound seems to come out of someone's mouth. Some distorted sounds. Some names came back to my mind, some faces, some details. No one could tell. Presumably, there are still two or three witnesses left who are still alive. But I am afraid that they have long forgotten all that. And, at the end of the day, I always ask myself in my heart if anyone has really witnessed all that.
It's true, I'm not dreaming. The black-faced notepad I left behind was ironclad evidence, and it was full of notes. The fog was thick, and I needed some words with clear meaning, so I looked it up in the dictionary. The inside pages of the notepad are gleefully recorded names, phone numbers, date dates, and some short essays that may have something to do with literature. But which category do you put them into? A private diary? Memory fragments? It also contained hundreds of small notices that had been published in newspapers. Dog Hunting Revelation. Furnished apartment for rent. Job search and job advertisements. Divination channeling information.
The notes are plentiful, and some of them produce more intense echoes than others. Especially when nothing disturbs the tranquility. It's been a long time since I've heard any phone ringing. No one would come knocking on the door. They must have thought I had gone west. You are alone, breathless, as if trying to intercept some Morse code sent to you from a distant land by a strange dispatcher. Of course, most of the code signals are disturbed, and no matter how long you stick your ears out, they have completely disappeared and are nowhere to be found. However, there are some names that appear in silence, on a blank piece of paper...
Danny, Paul Chastanier, Agamurri, Duwierz, Geral Marciano, "George", Hotel Unique, Rue Montparnasse... If I remember correctly, I was always alert when I was in that neighborhood. On that day, I happened to pass by the neighborhood. I had a very strange feeling. What feels strange is not that the years have gone without a trace, but that there is another me, a twin brother, still there, in the nearby area, not dying of old age, but still according to the details of life that are too small to be small, to continue to live the kind of life that I used to spend here briefly, until the end of time.
What used to make me feel uneasy? Is it because of these streets shrouded in the shadow of a train station and a cemetery? These streets suddenly seemed insignificant to me. The color of the side of the house facing the street has changed. Brighter. Nothing special. A neutral region. Is it really possible that the one I left behind is still there repeating every movement of my past, never ending along the lines I have taken before? No way, the traces we have left here are long gone. Time has swept everything away. The neighborhood has been renovated and neatly clean, as if it had been rebuilt on the site of an unhygienic island. Most of the buildings are still the same buildings, and you stand in front of those buildings, like standing in front of a dog that has been made into a specimen, a dog that once belonged to you and that you loved it when it was alive.
One Sunday in October, at dusk, my footsteps took me to this area, and if I had been on the rest of the week, I would have taken a detour. No, it's really not about going there to remember anything. But on Sundays, especially at dusk, and if you are walking alone, the river of time will open an opening. Just drill in from there. A dog that made a specimen that made you love while it was alive. As I passed by the unsightly off-white tall building at 11 Odessa Street, the one on the right, I had a sudden sense of enlightenment, a slight faint sensation that you could feel every time the river opened an opening. I stood there motionless, peering at the front and side walls of the building that enclosed the small courtyard in the middle. When Paul Chastanier stayed at the Uniq Hotel on Rue Montparnasse, he always parked his car there. One night, I asked him why he didn't park his car in front of the hotel. He smiled awkwardly, shrugged his shoulders, and replied, "For the sake of prudence..."
A red Blue Ciya. It has the potential to attract the attention of others. However, if he wanted to hide his eyes, how could he have such a strange idea and choose a car of this brand and color... Later, he explained to me that one of his friends lived in this building on Odessa Street and that he often lent his car to that friend. Yes, that's why he always parked his car there.
"For the sake of prudence." He said. I immediately figured out that this brown-haired man of about forty years old, always wearing gray clothes and an aquamarine coat, and who was dignified, did not have a serious career. I heard him calling at the Uniq Hotel, but the walls were too thick for me to hear the conversation. Only the sound of the partition wall can be heard, the voice is low, and sometimes it becomes cut to the point. Long silence. This Chastanière, I met in the Yunique Hotel, and I also met Geral Marciano, DuWierz, I forgot what Duwierz's last name was... As time passed, their figures gradually became blurred, and their voices could not be heard. Because of the color, Paul Les Champagneiers appeared clearer: pitch-black hair, an aquamarine coat, a red car. I guess he spent a few years in a cell, like Duwiers, like Marciano. He was the oldest of them all, and he must have been gone. He got up late every day and set his date in the very remote South City, the inland area that surrounded the train terminal, and the places called Falchiel and Allere were very familiar to me, and I could even go further, up to The Street of the Pet Princess... Some secluded and deserted café, he sometimes took me there, perhaps calculating that no one could find him in that kind of place. Although I often think of it, I have never dared to ask him if he has been deprived of his right of abode here. But why did he park the red car in front of the café? Wouldn't hiking be more cautious for him? Wouldn't it be better to be cautious and cautious? At that time, I always wandered through the neighborhoods that were beginning to be demolished, along the open spaces, the small buildings with dead windows, and the sections of streets that looked like they had been bombed in the rubble. And the red car parked there, the smell of leather emitted by the car, its bright color block, fortunately, there is this bright color block, the past re-emerges in the mind... past events? No. On this Sunday night, I finally convinced myself that time was frozen, and that if I had really crept into the opening of the river of time, I would have found everything again, and everything was intact and untouched. The first was the red sedan. I decided to walk all the way to Wandam Street. There was a café there, and Paula Dessantiers had taken me in, and our conversation there began to touch on personal private matters. I even felt like he was going to dig my heart and lungs out with me. He implicitly suggested that I "do things" for him. I prevaricated for a while. He didn't hold on any longer. I was very young, but also very suspicious. Later, I also visited this café with Dani.
Interview with a writer Who is the woman constantly looking for in the work?
After the publication of the French edition of Grass of the Night, Patrick Modiano gave an interview to the media.
Your novels tend to give people a similar feel. It's often said you're almost always writing the same book. What do you think of this statement?
Modiano: I'm often not very happy with the book I just finished, so I have to rewrite another one to accomplish what I didn't achieve in the previous book. So, I took some scenes from the previous book and expanded and played them. This repetition has a somewhat hypnotic effect like a prayer. When I was creating, I didn't realize this, and I wouldn't read any more works I had written before because they could be a barrier to me... You know, it's hard for writers to have a clear understanding of the works they create. Repetition may also stem from the fact that what happened at a certain time in my life often comes back to my mind and haunts me.
"A certain period" refers to the 1960s?
Modiano: Yeah, I was between the ages of 17 and 22. That was the engine of my fiction writing, because it was a strange and chaotic period. I don't have any family or social foundation. These factors are constantly circumvented, like recurring dreams.
What do you do from 17 to 22?
Modiano: I didn't go to school. I came to Paris after coming out of boarding school and had a bedroom in my mother's house, but she never stayed home. I began to let it go. During that time, I met some strange people, all older than me, which made me feel that I was in danger. Because I was not yet an adult, I always felt that I was living an illegal life, a life like an underground worker.
In "Grass of the Night", does Paris during the decolonization movement in the 1960s correspond to your previous writings about Paris under German occupation during World War II?
Modiano: When I was a teenager, I was very familiar with Paris in the early '60s, and in some of the surrounding areas of Paris, even in some places that opened at night— like the Don Camillo nightclub, two steps from my house, we could feel the turbulent atmosphere of the Algerian war. In Grass of the Night, some echoes of that period can be heard, but the Paris in this novel is also an inner, dream Paris.
You write about many Parisian neighborhoods in your novels, how did you choose them?
Modiano: I choose neighborhoods that I go to a lot, and some of them haunt my memory in a persistent way, such as the thirteenth district of Montsourry and the university town described in "The Grass of the Night."
These neighborhoods are inextricably linked to the bizarre 5 years of my life and the not-so-good things I've experienced. It was like a black hole. The ones I encounter often take me to dangerous places, and that feeling of being threatened lingers. It was also because Paris was a disturbing city at that time.
By 1968, when you were 23 years old, would this uneasiness have lessened a bit after you published The Star Square?
Modiano: Exactly. Before I wrote this novel, I was already working on it. I've tried to write about things that are relevant to myself in an autobiographical way, and I've tried to write about all the strange things I've witnessed. But most of that manuscript was lost. So I transitioned to fiction and wrote Star Square. The loss or theft of the previous work has something to do with the uncomfortable atmosphere of my youth, which I also experienced in my childhood. When I was a child, my mother entrusted me to a girlfriend who locked me up in her home around Paris, where something strange had happened. Later I became interested in the years when the Germans occupied Paris, because I was the product of those years.
When writing, do you go back to the places you wrote about in your novel?
Modiano: Yeah, but going there is often frustrating. Everything about the Uniq Hotel on Rue Montparnasse that I wrote about in the novel is what I saw in the '60s. I went back, but the Uniq Hotel is no longer there and has become an expensive hotel. Worst of all, that hotel had made me unable to remember anything. It was as if when I was writing, I could go back to the past like a dream, and I could relive the life that I had not lived well at that time. It's as if I can travel through the mirror of time and go back in time. And once those places disappear, it is impossible to restore them to their original appearance.
In one of Woody Allen's films, a character asks himself whether memories are something people keep or something is missing. In your novel, isn't the narrator's memory a combination of both?
Modiano: Yes, the narrator's memories are both what he retains and what he has lost. I feel like that's what I want to express: a mixture of forgetting and memory. Like the name of one of Paul Celan's poems: The Poppy and Memory, because the poppy is a flower associated with sleep and forgetfulness.
Who is the woman whose protagonist tries to get back again and again in the work?
Modiano: Again and again in my work is the same woman who appears as a ghost, not because I like the kind of character who comes and goes without a trace, but because the person who was once intimate with you is blurred like a photograph that may be eroded by the mold and oblivion of time. The essence of the problem is forgetting, not memory. What fascinates me is the fragment of oblivion.
Film "Lacombe Lucien"
In addition to his novels, Patrick Modiano collaborated with the famous French "New Wave" director Louis Mahler on the screenplay for lacombe Lucian. The film was released in 1974 and attracted much attention, almost winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but the sensitive subject matter also caused the film to suffer unprecedented controversy. As the director and co-screenwriter of the film, Mahler bore the brunt of the heavy public opinion "artillery" in France and was forced to emigrate to the United States.
In fact, from a plot point of view alone, Lacombe Lucien is completely "Modiano-style". It's "Star Plaza", it's "Night Watch", it's "Circular Boulevard"... It is Modiano's different variations on the same theme.
The film is still about France during World War II, occupied by Germany, an ordinary French teenager Lucien's blank choice and tragic fate before the identity crisis. At the beginning of the film, Lucien, riding a bicycle through the countryside, is still a light and stinky teenager. Like all other boys of this age, Lucien had nothing to do, but with the courage and impulse to resist, he hunted birds and finches and rabbits, looking for a source of energy. He wanted to join the village resistance, but was rejected because he was too young. Once, Lucien mistakenly entered the Hotel where the Gestapo gathered, but he focused on the Tour de France winner in the crowd, and thus became a member of the Gestapo in a vague way. He changed into his first suit, had a pistol for the first time, and followed his companions into the homes of underground party members and robbed them of money. This life seemed arrogant to himself, so that even if his father was imprisoned by the Germans, even if his fellow villagers had regarded him as a traitor to the Nazis, he had no regrets. Until he fell in love with the daughter of a Jewish family and took her to defect from the German police, Lucien did not care. On this young man's freckled face, there was always a confused look. He didn't understand or care about any camp, he just didn't like to be "talked condescendingly."
In the end, Lucien was captured by the rebels and sentenced to death.
It is understandable that the film caused an uproar among French audiences, as the American film critic Wheeler Winston Dixon commented, "It was very bold at the time, because it proposed that in wartime, not every French citizen was on the side of the resistance, and even many were willing to be accomplices of the Nazi government." And it is. This spike in the film still stings in France to this day. ”
But Modiano's focus has long since jumped out of politics and camps. The narrative of the film also echoes Modiano's consistent style, jumping in one fragmentary shot after another, like stringing together a memory, and finally frozen in Lucien's head pillow grass, looking at the calm face of the skylight, the sentenced text appears lightly above his freckles shining in the sun, which makes people wonder about the heavy meaning of the words. As insisted in all his works, Modiano is concerned with the confusion of the independent individual in the face of identity choices, and the inquiry of human nature and fate that he projects on Lucien is far deeper than a simple moral judgment.
Chronology of important works:
Star Square, 1968
Ringstraße, 1972
Dark Streets, 1978
Sunday in August, 1986
Crash in the Middle of the Night, 2003
Youth Cafe, 2007
Horizon 2010
Grass of the Night, 2012
So you don't get lost here, 2014
Journalist Good money