Every few years, the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to a European writer highly acclaimed in his or her own country, and perhaps in a few neighbouring countries, but unknown outside Europe, and thus spurs a cottage industry of re-publication. Books that have been several decades out of print are reissued or translated for the first time.
Keshava Guha Patrick Modiano, who won the Nobel in 2014, exemplifies this process. His elliptical yet readable novels tend to be brief and deal with France under German occupation: it is little surprise that winning the prize has brought him a wide English-speaking audience.
Modiano is in a rich tradition of writers — going as far back as Thackeray and Tolstoy — who are obsessed by the historical period immediately preceding their birth. Like the late W.G. Sebald, his novels interrogate the crimes and evasions of his parents’ generation, an urge that is understandable given that theirs was the generation of World War II and the Holocaust. Ring Roads opens with an epigraph from Rimbaud: “If only I had a past at some other point in French history! But no, nothing.”
The Occupation Trilogy brings together Modiano’s first three novels, written in his 20s, beginning with La Place de l’Étoile , which appeared when he was 23. It might more accurately have been called The Collaboration Trilogy: all three novels are set in and around occupied Paris, but the only aspect of occupation brought into sharp focus is collaboration, particularly Jewish collaboration.
La Place de l’Étoile is a coruscating, brutal satire of French anti-Semitism. The narrator, Raphael Schlemilovitch – at this point Modiano had no interest in subtlety — is a wealthy Jew growing up in post-war France. He seems at first to be an over-educated young man who is fascinated and repelled by his status as a French Jew. “As for me,” he declares, “I have decided to be the greatest Jewish-French writer after Montaigne, Marcel Proust and Louis-Ferdinand Celine (Modiano’s narrators tend to be writers, or at least highly literary). But the initial account of literary friendships and provocative assaults on famous writers — strikingly reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives — soon yields to Schlemilovitch’s manic, perhaps schizophrenic, delusions and hallucinations. He imagines for himself a career as a war-time collaborator, the leading Jewish anti-Semite in Europe, that is equal parts absurd — he is both a friend of Hitler and a lover of Eva Braun — and terrifying. Eventually, he is sent to a kind of concentration camp in Israel for re-education.
Modiano’s assault on all the hypocrisies and amnesia of post-war France is unrelenting. But he also has another, more specific target. While Schlemilovitch is a mentally ill fantasist, his father actually was a Jewish collaborator who made a fortune through wartime business dealings. Real, rather than imagined, collaboration is the subject of The Night Watch and Ring Roads , the novels that followed Modiano’s debut. The urge towards biographical explanations of a writer’s work is generally to be resisted, but not in Modiano’s case, especially as he himself encourages it, both in his memoirs and in interviews. As a child, Modiano was told little of his Jewish father’s wartime career. His investigation into his father’s past as a black marketeer and collaborator of the French Gestapo is the animating spirit behind these novels.
This is most directly true of Ring Roads , whose narrator is initially in search of a father that he hasn’t seen in ten years. He finds him on the outskirts of Paris, “on the fringes of the Forest of Fontainebleau”, in the company of a shady circle of black marketers and magazine editors. At times the satirical tone of La Place de L’ Étoile returns, as in the game of “Jewish tennis”: “The first to spot a Jew called out. Fifteen love.” But this is a much more personal and moving book, written in a mixture of the first and second person. — the former used for the narrator, with the father, and occasionally the narrator as well — addressed throughout as “you”. The father remains elusive: the narrator describes his associates “so that, through them, I can catch the fleeting image of my father. About him, I know almost nothing.”
The Night Watch , the middle novel in the trilogy, is the weakest of the three, but notable as the only first-person account of collaboration. The narrator is recruited by two gangsters working for the French Gestapo — known as the Khedive and Monsieur Philibert — to infiltrate a resistance cell, with the predictable consequence of divided loyalties. The narrator is a passive man, without “enough moral fibre to be a hero,” but “too dispassionate and distracted to be a real villain”. This self-description almost constitutes a summary of French weakness under occupation.
These novels are, unmistakably, of their time, with little faith in realistic narration or the psychological depiction of character. But Modiano is more than a sceptical post-modernist: his characters are shaped by history rather than the other way round, and these three books are an active, polemical intervention in historical debate, literature in the service of history and of self- understanding.
Keshava Guha is a writer based in Bengaluru.
