Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

by Patrick Modiano, Mark Polizzotti (Translator)

Overview

“Elegant. Unpretentious. Approachable. . . . He is, all in all, quite an endearing Nobelist.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
 
“Modiano is a pure original.”—Adam Thirlwell, The Guardian
 
“A fine introduction to Modiano’s later work.”—The Economist
 
“These novellas have a mood. They cast a spell.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times
 
In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume—Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin—represents a sterling example of the author’s originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti’s superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano’s distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose.
 
Although originally published separately, Modiano’s three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers—each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.
 
Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano’s fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person’s confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano’s trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300198058
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	11/11/2014
Series:	Margellos World Republic of Letters Series
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Patrick Modiano is a best-selling novelist and the winner of some of the most prestigious literary awards in France, including the Prix Goncourt and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca for lifetime achievement. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” Mark Polizzotti has translated numerous books from the French and is director of the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Editorial Reviews

The novellas in Suspended Sentences were…initially…published separately. Yet they cohere in tone, and intertwine in manners both physical and metaphysical…Mr. Modiano writes clear, languid and urbane sentences in Mr. Polizzotti's agile translation…these novellas have a mood. They cast a spell, one that I was mostly happy to submit to…Those who pick up Suspended Sentences will discover an author who frequently seems a flâneur of consciousness, strolling purposefully through Paris's cache of memories as well as his own.

The New York Times - Dwight Garner

The three novellas in Suspended Sentences first appeared in France between 1988 and 1993. With another author, they might be considered examples of earlier work, but not so with Modiano. Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti, they are as good a place as any to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano's fiction.

The New York Times Book Review - Alan Riding

10/20/2014
This set of three newly translated novellas from 2014 Nobel winner Modiano is propitious in timing and format: the collection’s variety gives curious readers a broad introduction to a writer of purposefully narrow scope. Modiano has facetiously admitted to repeatedly writing the same book, usually a meditative investigation winding its ways through the City of Lights to illuminate, though never fully reveal, some lingering mystery from the period of Nazi Occupation. These three atmospheric novellas demonstrate the range of reading pleasure afforded by Modiano’s approach and the dark romance of his Paris, a city “in which adventure lay right around every street corner.” “Afterimage,” the tautest, most affecting work, is a shadowy tale in which a young writer obsessively catalogs the work of a haunted photographer who “did everything he could to be forgotten.” The title novella, a child’s eye view of the colorful gang of ex-circus performers and crooks who helped raise him, relates the boy’s sense of wonder and confusion amid his charmed, if sordid, surroundings. In the slackest of the three, “Flowers of Ruin,” a sensationalist double suicide case occasions a murky investigation into the gangsters and collaborators who sported “strange names and fake noble titles” during the Occupation. Each first-person novella is also a portrait of the artist: as the protagonists pursue the faint traces of people and places that have disappeared, we witness a doggedly inquiring writer slowly emerging before our eyes. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti . . . [and] as good a place as any to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano’s fiction.”—Alan Riding, New York Times Book Review

“Elegant . . . quietly unpretentious, approachable. . . . Though enigmatic and open-ended, Modiano’s remembrances of things past and his probings of personal identity are presented with a surprisingly light touch. He is, all in all, quite an endearing Nobelist.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

“A timely glimpse at [Modiano’s] fixations. . . . In Mark Polizzotti’s spare and elegant translation, the writing conveys a sense of dreamy unease in which the real, the hypothesized, and the half-forgotten blend into a shimmering vagueness.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Mr. Modiano writes clear, languid, and urbane sentences in Mr. Polizzotti’s agile translation. . . . These novellas have a mood. They cast a spell.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times

“An excellent place to begin. . . . Here is the bracing darkness at the heart of Modiano’s vision of memory and modern day Paris, . . . a traveling back to travel forward, a journey these novellas pace with the elegance of a solitary walker, moving through a city’s streets, his collar up against the cold.”—John Freeman, Boston Globe

“The three novellas that make up Suspended Sentences offer a fine introduction to Modiano’s later work.”—The Economist

“Modiano is a pure original. He has transformed the novel into a laboratory for producing atmospheres, not situations—where everything must be inferred and nothing can be proved.”—Adam Thirlwell, The Guardian

“A series of meditations on the mutability of memory . . . [that] accumulates force quietly and veers without warning into the dark precincts of Modiano’s life. . . . The writing, translated crisply by Mark Polizzotti, is laced with investigations and speculations, false leads and dead ends.”—Bill Morris, Daily Beast

“These three atmospheric novellas demonstrate the range of reading pleasure afforded by Modiano’s approach and the dark romance of his Paris. . . . Each first-person novella is also a portrait of the artist.”—Publishers Weekly

“Haunting. . . . Modiano combines a detective’s curiosity with an elegist’s melancholy.”—Adam Kirsch, New Republic

“[A] trilogy of novellas from the recent French Nobel Prize winner. . . . Fictions with a moral bite, depicting a world in which everyone, it seems, is complicit in crimes not yet specified. Moody, elegant and dour.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“The three novellas that make up this exquisite collection are mysteries, albeit mysteries of an existential sort.”—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

“Compelling. . . . Haunting. . . . Modiano’s unconventional accounts of vanished hours show how the urge to solve a long-lost crime, or to reclaim forgotten memories, ultimately leads to inscrutable vanishing points.”—Scott Esposito, San Francisco Chronicle

“Brilliant.”—New York Magazine

“Mesmerizing . . . evocative and nostalgic. . . . These are stories that continue to haunt, even after the final page. . . . For English-language readers, this collection serves as the discovery of a unique, masterful writer.”—Gila Wertheimer, Chicago Jewish Star

“[A] welcome translation. . . . [Modiano’s] stories include suspenseful passages and are invariably absorbing . . . and offer much to ponder as one proceeds.”—John Taylor, Arts Fuse

“Beautiful and fascinating.”—M. A. Orthofer, Complete Review

“Striking and poignant.”—Kacy Muir, Weekender

“The voice of the narrator is clear and melodious . . . [as] three novellas progressively introduce the reader to the bifocal world of Modiano’s evocatively detailed but fragmented memory. Imagine a concert that starts with a sonata, is followed by a quartet, and ends with a full symphony.”—Marianne Veron, Moment Magazine

“The three novellas in this book show a consistent, inherently logical artistic vision—a sign of a great writer. Modiano’s sadness, expressed in his sparseness of style and in obsessive leitmotif connections, is unique.”—Aleksandar Hemon, The Week

“The three novellas in Suspended Sentences offer a vivid glimpse into Modiano’s photographic remembrance of things past.”—Brandon Ambrosino, Vox

“Like [W. G.] Sebald, Modiano blends fact and fiction, memoir and reportage . . . obsessed with unearthing lives buried under the avalanche of time.”—Ryu Spaeth, The Week

“A hauntingly beautiful reminder of the power and resonance memory has on our daily lives . . . a brilliant collection. . . . [Modiano] is a masterful writer, storyteller, and philosopher all rolled into one and Suspended Sentences confirms it.”—Henry Solotaroff-Webber, Daily Cardinal (Madison, WI)

“Skillfully translated by Mark Polizzotti. . . . Comparing the English with the French original, one finds the same limpid quality in both.”—Karen McPherson, Translation Review

“A lovely, supple book . . . compelling.”—Nathan Leslie, Prick of the Spindle: A Journal of the Literary Arts

Patrick Modiano is the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature

“Reading Modiano is like experiencing a very specific flavor you don’t encounter every day—saffron or asafetida, say. He’s direct and precise, but also gently melancholy, like the squeezed essence of passing time. Mark Polizzotti’s translation expertly catches the timbre of his voice.”—Luc Sante

“Haunting. Like a master perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his unmistakable blend of nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris. In any translation, exotic décor comes easy but to capture the atmosphere of the words is much harder—Polizzotti succeeds beautifully in creating the impalpable magic of Modiano’s world in English.”—Damion Searls

“Completely, insouciantly, Modiano describes the interiors and essential matter of the French literary imagination. In these fictions, the sworn bewilderment of intimacy as cause and quest and actual topography of narrative becomes an inexhaustible source. And from that source there flows a riverine voice of legends and documentary legerdemain: always candid, always fitly perplexed. In the three novellas gathered as Suspended Sentences, this voice elapses across Paris as it never was, yet somehow must have been. Otherwise, there could be no accounting for acrobats, for Edith Piaf, for collaboration and liberation and the spring of 1968. All of these and more Modiano addresses with a luminous bewilderment more intimately exacting and more precise than any certainty could be.”—Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems

“The three novellas included in this volume by this year’s Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano offer eloquent testimony to the writer’s remarkable gift for evoking the power of the past over human lives and destinies, and the ephemeral and ultimately mysterious nature of human relationships. They also capture Modiano’s unrivaled ability to describe in limpid and haunting prose the power of a place, Paris, and to make its history and geography come alive in new and unexpected ways. Beautifully translated by Mark Polizzotti, this small volume will familiarize Anglophone readers with the talent and genius of France’s best- kept literary secret.”—Richard J. Golsan, Texas A&M University

“The Nobel Prize committee’s abrupt elevation of Patrick Modiano to international prominence makes the publication of these three works particularly valuable; not only has very little of the author’s work appeared in English, but Mark Polizzotti’s long experience as editor, publisher, and translator, together with his truly astonishing familiarity with the French language, has advantageously equipped him to execute his finely-tuned English renderings of these discreetly complex texts. Modiano belongs to one of the great traditions of French fiction, inaugurated by Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves, continued (this is a very short list) in Marivaux’s novels, later in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Flaubert’s Three Tales and A Sentimental Education, in the 20th century variously developed by its three great Raymonds—Radiguet, Roussel, and Queneau—and, greatest of all, Marcel Proust, and in our own time flourishing anew in the pages of Patrick Modiano and Jean Echenoz. To the thousands of French readers of Modiano, declaring him a great writer is obvious, necessary, and inexplicable: he and his tradition depend on intimacy, precision, and a ruthless avoidance of reassuring conclusions—that is, modest qualities. Modiano’s tales are mostly centered on life in outlying parts of Paris during and after World War II; place and time are rendered with alluring exactness, as are their fugitive inhabitants, and all are then inevitably lost in a blur of evanescent clues that leave nothing but an hallucinatory melancholy behind: a melancholy that enchants a rediscovered world with mysterious, hopeless magic. Modiano has said of his work, “I have always felt that I’ve been writing the same book for the past 45 years”; but each novel is unflaggingly fresh, with writing of exemplary purity, depending on nothing but itself for the reality it creates. Now, with Suspended Sentences in hand, you can enter this hauntingly vivid new world. I strongly urge you not to let the opportunity pass you by.”—Harry Mathews

From the Publisher

‘[The] three novellas published as Suspended Sentences (trans. Mark Polizotti) are terrific, uncanny strange pieces of work about experiencing the past and how to make sense of events.’—Jerome de Groot, History Today.

History Today - Jerome de Groot

‘Suspended Sentences goes to the heart of Modiano’s technique, his way of setting up a structural skeleton, then allowing imagination (and imaginative uncertainty) not only to fill in the blanks, but to overlay a new, sometimes alternative narrative on that structure: to create words out of silence and, perhaps, a silence out of words.’—West Camel, 3AM Magazine.

3AM Magazine - West Camel

'. . . a sympathetic translation of three of Modiano’s novellas. . . reveal the unique qualities of his fictional world which has given rise to an adjective in France, “Modianoesque”, meaning an ambiguous person or situation. . . These stories are a kind of mood music, frustratingly inconclusive but unexpectedly stirring.’—David Sexton, The Evening Standard

The Evening Standard - David Sexton

“These novellas resemble a cross between metaphysical mystery stories and lyrical memoir. Modiano is at his best when his narrators—are they three separate narrators or perhaps only one and the same?—conjure up a remembered childhood inflected by historical figures and real places, from Violette Nozière and Robert Capa to the Drancy transit camp and the Quai d’Austerlitz in Paris. All three stories set the recall of a personal past within the twilight world of elusive father in whose footsteps Modiano’s narrators seem forever to be following.  Mark Polizzotti’s translation catches the tone and lilt of a singularly evocative prose.”—Steven Ungar, University of Iowa

Steven Ungar

“Patrick Modiano, that great chronicler of lost souls, is at his masterful best in these three linked short novels, which have been expertly translated by Mark Polizzotti.  Memories of places and people from the narrator’s childhood and youth mingle across the years, together with the searing sense that he will never fully understand his own past, nor the stories of his elusive parents, in a Parisi he remembers as still haunted by ghosts of World War II.  No living author has rendered the melancholy of incomplete histories and ‘suspended sentences’ more beautifully than Modiano.  Already a revered author in France, he is sure to gain world-wide admiration and enthusiastic readers as a result of his well-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature.”—Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University; author of Crises of Memory and the Second World War

Susan Rubin Suleiman

Patrick Modiano is the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature

Nobel Prize in Literature

“The Nobel Prize committee’s abrupt elevation of Patrick Modiano to international prominence makes the publication of these three works particularly valuable; not only has very little of the author’s work appeared in English, but Mark Polizzotti’s long experience as editor, publisher, and translator, together with his truly astonishing familiarity with the French language, has advantageously equipped him to execute his finely-tuned English renderings of these discreetly complex texts. Modiano belongs to one of the great traditions of French fiction, inaugurated by Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves, continued (this is a very short list) in Marivaux’s novels, later in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons and Flaubert’s Three Tales and ASentimental Education, in the 20th century variously developed by its three great Raymonds – Radiguet, Roussel, and Queneau – and, greatest of all, Marcel Proust, and in our own time flourishing anew in the pages of Patrick Modiano and Jean Echenoz. To the thousands of French readers of Modiano, declaring him a great writer is obvious, necessary, and inexplicable: he and his tradition depend on intimacy, precision, and a ruthless avoidance of reassuring conclusions – that is, modest qualities. Modiano’s tales are mostly centered on life in outlying parts of Paris during and after World War II; place and time are rendered with alluring exactness, as are their fugitive inhabitants, and all are then inevitably lost in a blur of evanescent clues that leave nothing but an hallucinatory melancholy behind: a melancholy that enchants a rediscovered world with mysterious, hopeless magic. Modiano has said of his work, “I have always felt that I’ve been writing the same book for the past 45 years”; but each novel is unflaggingly fresh, with writing of exemplary purity, depending on nothing but itself for the reality it creates. Now, with Suspended Sentences in hand, you can enter this hauntingly vivid new world. I strongly urge you not to let the opportunity pass you by.”—Harry Mathews

Harry Mathews

“The three novellas included in this volume by this year’s Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano offer eloquent testimony to the writer’s remarkable gift for evoking the power of the past over human lives and destinies, and the ephemeral and ultimately mysterious nature of human relationships. They also capture Modiano’s unrivaled ability to describe in limpid and haunting prose the power of a place, Paris, and to make its history and geography come alive in new and unexpected ways. Beautifully translated by Mark Polizzotti, this small volume will familiarize Anglophone readers with the talent and genius of France’s best- kept literary secret.”—Richard J. Golsan, Texas A&M University

Richard J. Golsan

“Completely, insouciantly, Modiano describes the interiors and essential matter of the French literary imagination. In these fictions, the sworn bewilderment of intimacy as cause and quest and actual topography of narrative becomes an inexhaustible source. And from that source there flows a riverine voice of legends and documentary legerdemain: always candid, always fitly perplexed. In the three novellas gathered as Suspended Sentences, this voice elapses across Paris as it never was, yet somehow must have been. Otherwise, there could be no accounting for acrobats, for Edith Piaf, for collaboration and liberation and the spring of 1968. All of these and more Modiano addresses with a luminous bewilderment more intimately exacting and more precise than any certainty could be.”—Donald Revell, Author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems

Donald Revell

“Haunting. Like a master perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his unmistakable blend of nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris. In any translation, exotic décor comes easy but to capture the atmosphere of the words is much harder — Polizzotti succeeds beautifully in creating the impalpable magic of Modiano’s world in English.”—Damion Searls

Damion Searls

“Reading Modiano is like experiencing a very specific flavor you don’t encounter every day—saffron or asafetida, say. He’s direct and precise, but also gently melancholy, like the squeezed essence of passing time. Mark Polizzotti’s translation expertly catches the timbre of his voice.”—Luc Sante

Luc Sante

“Like [W.G.] Sebald, Modiano blends fact and fiction, memoir and reportage . . . obsessed with unearthing lives buried under the avalanche of time.”—Ryu Spaeth, the Week

the Week - Ryu Spaeth

“The three novellas in Suspended Sentences offer a vivid glimpse into Modiano's photographic remembrance of things past.”—Brandon Ambrosino, Vox

Vox - Brandon Ambrosino

"In poetic prose, Modiano evokes a Paris that no longer exists, yet lingers in the light and shadows of memory."—Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com
 

BBC.com - Jane Ciabattari

“The three novellas in this book show a consistent, inherently logical artistic vision—a sign of a great writer. Modiano's sadness, expressed in his sparseness of style and in obsessive leitmotif connections, is unique.”—Aleksandar Hemon, The Week

The Week - Aleksandar Hemon

“The voice of the narrator is clear and melodious . . . [as] three novellas progressively introduce the reader to the bifocal world of Modiano’s evocatively detailed but fragmented memory. Imagine a concert that starts with a sonata, is followed by a quartet, and ends with a full symphony.”—Marianne Veron, Moment magazine

Moment magazine - Marianne Veron

'. . . the very resonance of the novellas resides in the way Modiano resists supplying easy solutions or proposing a didactic position. The Nobel laureateship has drawn attention to a writer whose work is engaging and thought-provoking. . .’—Alexander Adams, Spiked Online

Spiked Online - Alexander Adams

“Striking and poignant.”—Kacy Muir, Weekender

Weekender - Kacy Muir

“Beautiful and fascinating”—M.A. Orthofer, Complete Review

Complete Review - M.A. Orthofer

'[The novellas] are an excellent introduction to the writer, not least because they show quite how much he retreads the same territory. . .Modiano is as accessible as he is engrossing.'—Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent

The Independent - Jonathan Gibbs

“A series of meditations on the mutability of memory . . . [that] accumulates force quietly and veers without warning into the dark precincts of Modiano’s life. . . . The writing, translated crisply by Mark Polizzotti, is laced with investigations and speculations, false leads and dead ends.”—Bill Morris, Daily Beast

Daily Beast - Bill Morris

“[A] welcome translation . . . [Modiano’s] stories include suspenseful passages and are invariably absorbing . . . and offer much to ponder as one proceeds.”—John Taylor, Arts Fuse

Arts Fuse - John Taylor

“Mesmerizing . . . evocative and nostalgic . . . These are stories that continue to haunt, even after the final page . . . For English-language readers, this collection serves as the discovery of a unique, masterful writer.”—Gila Wertheimer, Chicago Jewish Star

Chicago Jewish Star - Gila Wertheimer

'There are few modern writers as pleasurable or interesting to read. Modiano is one of the greatest writers of our time.’—David Herman, Jewish Chronicle.

Jewish Chronicle - David Herman

'Modiano is a pure original. He has transformed the novel into a laboratory for producing atmospheres, not situations - where everything must be inferred and nothing can be proved.'—Adam Thirlwell, The Guardian

The Guardian - Adam Thirlwell

'The three novellas that make up Suspended Sentences offer a fine introduction to Modiano’s later work.'—The Economist

The Economist

“Compelling. . . . Haunting. . . . Modiano’s unconventional accounts of vanished hours show how the urge to solve a long-lost crime, or to reclaim forgotten memories, ultimately leads to inscrutable vanishing points.”—Scott Esposito, San Francisco Chronicle

San Francisco Chronicle - Scott Esposito

“An excellent place to begin. . . . Here is the bracing darkness at the heart of Modiano’s vision of memory and modern day Paris, . . . a traveling back to travel forward, a journey these novellas pace with the elegance of a solitary walker, moving through a city’s streets, his collar up against the cold.”—John Freeman, Boston Globe

Boston Globe - John Freeman

“The three novellas that make up this exquisite collection are mysteries, albeit mysteries of an existential sort.”—David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles Times - David L. Ulin

“Mr. Modiano writes clear, languid, and urbane sentences in Mr. Polizzotti’s agile translation . . . . These novellas have a mood. They cast a spell.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times

New York Times - Dwight Garner

“A timely glimpse at [Modiano’s] fixations . . . . In Mark Polizzotti’s spare and elegant translation, the writing conveys a sense of dreamy unease in which the real, the hypothesized, and the half-forgotten blend into a shimmering vagueness.”—Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal - Sam Sacks

“Haunting. . . . Modiano combines a detective’s curiosity with an elegist’s melancholy.”—Adam Kirsch, New Republic

New Republic - Adam Kirsch

“Elegant . . . quietly unpretentious, approachable . . . . Though enigmatic and open-ended, Modiano’s remembrances of things past and his probings of personal identity are presented with a surprisingly light touch. He is, all in all, quite an endearing Nobelist.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post

Washington Post - Michael Dirda

“Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti . . . [and] as good a place as any to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano’s fiction.”—Alan Riding, New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review - Alan Riding

“Skillfully translated by Mark Polizzotti . . . Comparing the English with the French original, one finds the same limpid quality in both.”—Karen McPherson, Translation Review

Translation Review - Karen McPherson

'The novellas are discrete and discontinuous but remarkably coherent. . . they investigate the shape of memory, probing moral and historical complexity with spare, finely honed prose.’—Ruth Scurr, The Spectator

The Spectator - Ruth Scurr

"English readers seeking an introduction to the author would do well to start with Mark Polizzotti’s diligent translation . . . rendering into English the eerie wistfulness of Mr Modiano’s French, with its soft cadences and subtle movement between tenses. . . . A writer so central to the French literary imagination ought now to take his place on the global stage."—Toby Lichtig, Wall Street Journal European edition

Wall Street Journal (European Edition) - Toby Lichtig

“Brilliant”—New York Magazine “Approval Matrix

New York Magazine “Approval Matrix”

12/01/2014
Planned as a February 2015 release but moved up when its author won the Nobel Prize, this volume collects three novellas that are quintessential Modiano. "Afterimages," whose narrator recalls a photographer acquaintance who was not what he seemed; "Suspended Sentences," about a boy raised by friends of his touring actress mother; and "Flowers of Ruin," whose protagonist revisits a site of his youth, where a mysterious double-suicide took place—all concern the uncertainty of memory. The result is elegantly meditative yet remote, a still lake reflecting itself; handy as an introduction to a world figure.

Library Journal

★ 2014-11-18
"One meets the strangest people in one's life." Indeed, and so it is in this somber trilogy of novellas from the recent French Nobel Prize winner.Modiano's work is unknown to most North American readers, and this is as good an introduction as any. The stories here highlight his concerns as a chronicler of the Occupation years and the lean times leading up to 1968; if they were films—and, it should be noted, Modiano is also a screenwriter; co-author, among other things, of the script for Lacombe Lucien (1974)—then Jean-Paul Belmondo would play several leads, always with a Gauloise stuck in his mouth at a moody, meaningful angle. The first story, Afterimage, concerns a mysterious photographer who works the chic world of fashion while maintaining a very private aura; the narrator announces at the beginning that he still knows only a little about Francis Jansen, who "did everything he could to be forgotten…completely dropping out of sight." Jansen is the antithesis of what a swinging fashion photographer is supposed to be, as if Camus had a Rollei slung around his neck—and yet there he is, the owner of "a truth that we've intuited but kept hidden from ourselves, out of carelessness or cowardice." Lean, existentially charged, the title story depicts a boy at the boundary of bourgeois society and the demimonde of the theater and circus, where people bear names such as Little Hélène and Snow White and have done some jail time. The Baudelarian title of the last story, Flowers of Ruin, signals that the reader should not expect a light farce, and indeed, a police report figures in the first few pages. In a preface, the translator notes that the stories were published several years apart but cohere nicely, and though they're closely informed by the events of Modiano's life, "it is important to remember that these are fictions." Yes, but fictions with a moral bite, depicting a world in which everyone, it seems, is complicit in crimes not yet specified. Moody, elegant and dour.

Kirkus Reviews