3 best books by Patrick Modiano

patrick modiano was born in 1945, a few months after the end of World War II. He could hardly perceive the direct effects of the war, and yet his interest in family experiences and adventures marked a large part of his work.

In that great conflict, the victims of the civilian population were differentiated between those who died and those who remained alive to tell it but, precisely at the time of telling it, they discovered their own identity blurred, partly by the war itself and partly by the horrors that are always intended to be removed from memory.

Hence the habitual tone of identity search in Modiano's characters. Characters, people, humans who sometimes roam the streets, past, present and longings for the future. A true melting pot of hollow souls that during any war and even after it try to return to their being among the rubble of physical existence.

Despite the existentialist presentation, Patrick Modiano also presents living stories, variable scenarios, a fantastic dynamism that complements the background of his stories.

3 recommended novels by Patrick Modiano

Dark shopping street

There is no greater mystery than identity. Rooting gives us personality, a sense of belonging, roots, customs. But identity can be lost or stolen from us and then we become alienated souls, strollers of the deepest melancholy.

Summary: Guy Roland is a man without a past and without memory. He has worked for eight years at the detective agency of Baron Constantin von Hutte, who has just retired, and is now embarking, in this mystery novel, on a gripping journey into the past on the trail of his own lost identity. Step by step Guy Roland is going to reconstruct his uncertain history, whose pieces are scattered around Bora Bora, New York, Vichy or Rome, and whose witnesses inhabit a Paris that shows the wounds of its recent history.

A novel that places us before an evanescent self, a specter that tries to become corporeal on a return trip to a forgotten time. But this search is also a powerful reflection on the mechanisms of fiction, and Street of the Dark Shops is a novel about the fragility of memory that will undoubtedly remain in the memory.

Street of the Dark Shops

Sad Villa

We cannot always stay behind our mask. Perhaps with respect to official civic forms, but the soul, our soul waits for its moment to escape the carnival and show itself as it is, with the sharp edges of the past and the frustrations of impossible repairs.

Summary: Early sixties, in the last century. An eighteen-year-old who the reader will only meet under a fictitious identity, that of Count Victor Chmara, hides from the horror of the Franco-Algerian war in a small provincial town near the border with Switzerland. Housed in Les Tilleuls, a family pension, Chmara leads a discreet and silent existence until he meets Yvonne, a young French actress with whom he will soon start a brilliant love story, and at his right hand, René Meinthe, a vaudeville character, a A homosexual doctor who calls himself Queen Astrid and who always accompanies Yvonne.

With them, Victor enters that circle of worldly people who meet at the spa in the provincial city, the oasis where they spend the summer. Along with Ivonne and Meinthe circulates a diverse gallery of characters; From party to party, they live in a kind of eternal present, with their backs turned from the din of the world and politics, the post-colonial France of the sixties ...

However, as often happens in Modiano's novels, things are not just what they seem and very soon we discover that the gaze of the narrator, that ghostly Victor Chmara, jumps between the present and a past idealized by the passage of time and the memory sieve.

Sad Villa

A circus passes

No author so blatantly expresses his idea of ​​presenting a city made his own. Modiano's Paris is something entirely his.

A city of lights dedicated to the particular focus of this author determined to transform Paris, to humanize streets and buildings, to set Paris as the circus that it is, as any other city is for a seasoned observer who discovers the circus of life passing .

Summary: Patrick Modiano's Paris is an almost dreamlike territory in which, paradoxically, the streets and buildings appear with their name and real location. The writer has compared his novels to paintings by Magritte in which, despite their unreal atmosphere, the objects are drawn very clearly.

Modiano has paid special attention to what he calls the neutral zones of Paris, neighborhoods without a precise identity, "no man's land, where you are on the border of everything."

A circus passes

Other recommended books by Patrick Modiano

Chevreuse

Only the masters of literature can return to the place where he left happy. Because only they are capable of endowing that melancholy with the most precise tone, with the sum of colors that turn experiences into frescoes full of life. That's what Modiano does for the protagonist Guy of him in this case.

Chevreuse: one word. Chevreuse: a place. Chevreuse: a scene of memory. Jean Bosmans returns, accompanied by two friends, to a house where he lived as a child. There, in the forties, also lived a shady and elusive character, Guy Vincent, a black marketeer who had just been released from jail and then disappeared without a trace.

Helped by his friend Camille, Bosmans begins an investigation into his memories and the drifts they have in the present. In the past there is a secret hiding place, which may contain a treasure. In the present there is another house, one in whose living room with divans strangers gather; and there is also a girl who takes care of the owner's son, a man with whom there is a meeting in a cafe, secrets that seemed forgotten and re-emerge causing greed, or the simple desire to understand what happened...

The new work of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano is a police novel populated by ghosts; an initiation novel around a search; a novel about memory and its labyrinths; a novel about the mystery of human existence. An enigmatic, seductive and dazzling investigation in which the questions are more important than the answers.

Chevreuse
5/5 - (7 votes)

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