Patrick Modiano
 
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French author Patrick Modiano will have a significantly higher profile after winning this year’s Nobel Prize in literature. For readers who might not be familiar with his work, here are three excerpts that that make a good introduction:
“Honeymoon” by Patrick Modiano. Translation by Barbara Wright.  French publication by Éditions Gallimard, 1990; Godine edition 1995.
Description: A documentary filmmaker leaves his wife and career and spends his days outside Pairs haunted by memories of a refugee couple he met 20 years earlier.
Excerpt: At Juan-les-Pins, people behaved as if the war didn’t exist. The men wore beach trousers and the women light-coloured pareus. All these people were some twenty years older than Ingrid and Rigaud, but this was barely noticeable. Owing to their suntanned skin and their athletic gait, they still looked young and falsely carefree.
They didn’t know the way things would go when the summer was over. At aperitif time, they exchanged addresses. Would they be able to get rooms at Megève this winter? Some preferred the Val-d’Isère, and were already getting ready to book accommodation at the Col de l’Iseran. Others had no intention of leaving the Côte d’Azur. It was possible that they were going to reopen the Altitude 43 in Saint-Tropez, that white hotel which looks like a liner grounded among the pines above the Plage de la Bouillabaisse. They would be safe there.
Fleeting signs of anguish could be read on their faces under the suntan: to think that they were going to have to be permanently on the move, searching for a place that the war had spared, and that these oases were going to become rare all the time . . . Rationing was beginning on the Côte. You mustn’t think about anything, so as not to undermine your morale. These idle days sometimes gave you a feeling of being under house arrest. You had to create a vacuum in your head. Let yourself be gently numbed by the sun and the swaying of the palm trees in the breeze . . . Shut your eyes.
Ingrid and Rigaud lived the same sort of life as these people who were forgetting the war, but they kept out of their way and avoided speaking to them. At first, everyone had been astonished by their youth. Were they waiting for their parents? Were they on holiday? Rigaud had replied that Ingrid and he “were on honeymoon”, quite simply. And this reply, far from surprising them, had reassured the guests at the Provençal. If young people still went on honeymoon, it meant that the situation wasn’t so tragic as all that and that the earth was still going round.

“Missing Person” by Patrick Modiano. Translation by Daniel Weissbort. French publication by Éditions Gallimard, 1978; first English (UK) publication, 1980; Godine edition, 2005
Description: The story follows Guy Roland as he attempts to recover his repressed past and identity in the years after the Paris Occupation. 
Excerpt: I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café terrace, waiting for the rain to stop; the shower had started when Hutte left me.
Some hours before, we had met again for the last time on the premises of the Agency. Hutte, as usual, sat at his massive desk, but with his coat on, so that there was really an air of departure about it. I sat opposite him, in the leather armchair we kept for clients. The opaline lamp shed a bright light which dazzled me.
“Well, there we are, Guy . . . That’s it . . . ,” said Hutte, with a sigh.
A stray file lay on the desk. Maybe it was the one belonging to the dark little man with the frightened expression and the puffy face, who had hired us to follow his wife. In the afternoon, she met another dark little man with a puffy face, at a residential hotel, in Rue Vital, close to Avenue Paul-Doumer.
Thoughtfully, Hutte stroked his beard, a grizzly, close-cut beard, but one which spread out over his cheeks. His large, limpid eyes stared dreamily ahead. To the left of the desk, the wicker chair where I sat during working hours. Behind Hutte, dark wooden shelves covered half the wall: there were rows of street-and-trade directories and yearbooks of all kinds, going back over the last fifty years. Hutte had often told me that these were the essential tools of the trade and that he would never part with them. And that these directories and yearbooks constituted the most valuable and moving library you could imagine, as their pages listed people, things, vanished worlds, to which they alone bore witness.

“Catherine Certitude” by Patrick Modiano. Translated by William Rodarmor, with illustrations by Jean-Jacques Sempé.  French by Éditions Gallimard, 1988; Godine edition 2001
Description: An illustrated children’s book filled with mysterious, unanswered questions, the story focuses on a mother, Catherine, reflecting on her childhood in Paris. 
Excerpt: It’s snowing here in New York, and I’m looking out the windows of my 59th Street apartment at the building across the way where I run a dance school. Behind the large glass panes, the students in leotards have stopped their pointe work and entrechats practice. As a change of pace, my daughter, who works as my assistant, is showing them a jazz step.
I’ll join them in a few minutes.
Among the students is a little girl who wears glasses. She set them down on a chair before the class started, the way I used to when I was her age and taking classes with Madame Dismailova. You don’t wear glasses when you dance. I remember that when I was with Madame Dismailova, I would practice not wearing my glasses during the day. The shapes of people and things lost their sharpness and everything was blurry. Even sounds became muffled. Without my glasses, the world lost its roughness and became as soft and downy as the big pillow I used to lean my cheek against before going to sleep.
“What are you daydreaming about, Catherine?” my father would ask me. “You should put your glasses on.”
I did as he said, and everything changed back to its everyday sharpness and precision. When I wore my glasses I saw the world as it was. I couldn’t dream anymore.