Suspended sentences Three novellas

the surest sign that international publishers were caught off guard when the French novelist Patrick Modiano won this year's Nobel literature prize was that few of his books were available in translation. Many people in France were also surprised, but for a different reason. Unlike most of that country's intellectuals, Modiano has never sought celebrity. Indeed, this 69-year-old man seems as shy and withdrawn today as he was at 23, when his first novel was published. This is apparent in the stuttering responses he offers in his rare interviews. It is still more evident in the elusive, introspective quality of his writing. His novels have been described as literary detective stories, yet the mysteries he examines are never fully solved, so he keeps returning to them. "I always have the impression that I write the same book, which means it's already 45 years that I've been writing the same book," he remarked when informed of his Nobel Prize. 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 Swedish Academy honored him "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation." But if "memory" and "occupation" are useful tags for his writing, it is another word - "father" - that provides the real key to his unfinished exploration of the German occupation of France. In his late teens, Modiano deduced that his Jewish-Italian father, Albert, spent the war years as a black marketeer associated with the notorious and brutal Rue Lauriston gang, also known as the French Gestapo. And since his father revealed nothing before his death in 1977, not even who ordered his release from a Jewish detention center in Paris in 1943, Modiano became obsessed with knowing more. His first novel, "La Place de l'Étoile," published in 1968 and still not translated into English, is arguably his most explosive. As if directly confronting his father, Modiano's narrator, Raphaël Schlemilovitch, is an amoral Jew who hangs out with the most renowned French collaborators. Modiano's father was outraged, and the two became even more estranged. In most of Modiano's other books, in which the occupation is more of a past trauma than a continuing tragedy, he sets out to fill the gaps of memory, to discover what really happened. In the 1997 novel "Dora Bruder," for example, he tries to unravel the mystery of why a 15-year-old Jewish girl fled the safety of a convent in late 1941, only to be recorded months later on a train carrying Jews to Auschwitz. In the novellas translated now in "Suspended Sentences," the narrator seems inseparable from Modiano, even calling himself Patoche, a nickname for Patrick. He remembers people, events, buildings and streets from the 1950s and '60s and then, writing years later, excavates an account of the occupation. Yet where real life gives way to fiction remains unclear. In "Afterimage," the 19-year-old narrator meets a middle-aged Jewish-Italian photographer, Francis Jansen, who was arrested during the occupation and released at the request of the Italian Consulate. Befriended by Robert Capa, he worked for some time for the Magnum agency (no Jansen is listed as having been a member of Magnum), but he now plans to abandon photography and leave France. The narrator offers to catalog his prints. "I had taken on this job because I refused to accept that people and things could disappear without a trace," he writes, as if explaining Modiano's entire literary mission. He also meets Jansen's mistress and friends, but when he later writes about them, he laments that "so many proofs and witnesses can disappear in 30 years." In the title novella, set in 1955, Patoche and his younger brother are lodged with three women outside Paris while their actress mother is touring and their father is traveling. The house has mysterious visitors, and one evening Patoche hears one say: "Andrée was part of the Rue Lauriston gang." At the time, this means nothing to him, but: "Subsequently, I again overheard the name in their conversation and I became used to the sound of it. A few years later, I heard it in the mouth of my father, but I didn't know that 'the Rue Lauriston gang' would haunt me for such a long time." He describes his father's detention in the Magasins Généraux on the Quai de la Gare, where looted Jewish belongings were sorted for shipment to Germany. "One night someone showed up in an automobile at the Quai de la Gare and had my father released. I imagined - rightly or wrongly - that it was a certain Louis Pagnon, whom they called 'Eddy' and who was shot after the Liberation with members of the Rue Lauriston gang, to which he belonged." PATOCHE'S CHILDHOOD ACCOUNT also ends abruptly. During his lunch break from school, he finds the women's house empty. Puzzled, he and his brother go for a walk and return to find the police searching the house. They are told that "something very serious" has happened. "And my brother and I, we pretended to play in the garden, waiting for someone to come collect us." Only later does he understand that the women and their visitors were trafficking in stolen goods. In the final novella, "Flowers of Ruin," the narrator returns to the Left Bank of the 1960s, where, while investigating the double suicide of a young couple that took place in 1933, he finds an old newspaper account suggesting that they had been out on the town just beforehand. Ever the sleuth, he discovers a house near Paris with an elevator "lined with red velvet," which the dying woman had described. Quite separately, he meets an enigmatic man, some 20 years his senior, who goes by the names of Pacheco and Philippe de Bellune. More newspaper research reveals that someone with those names was a collaborator during the occupation and either died in Dachau or was summoned to appear in court after the war. The man known to the narrator then disappears. Like scattered memories, stories come and go, some connected, others not. One tells of a Sylviane, who married a penniless aristocrat and ended up as mistress to Pagnon, the gangster who may have freed the narrator's father from internment. "When my father left the Magasins Généraux, I wonder what route he took in the blackout. He must have felt dumbfounded at having been spared." Written several years apart, these novellas fit neatly into Modiano's 'same book," where the shadowy figures and dark streets of postwar Paris are forever scoured for secrets of an occupation most of the French prefer to forget. "Maybe someday," the author writes in "Afterimage," "I'll manage to break through that layer of silence and amnesia." He seems certain to keep trying. Modiano's novels are literary detective stories, yet their mysteries are never fully solved. ALAN RIDING is a former European cultural correspondent far The Times. His most recent book is "And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris."

Much celebrated in France and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize, Modiano is little known in the U.S. While his style could not be more different from that of W. G. Sebald, they share a subject: the displaced, people too experienced with the arbitrariness of fate. Modiano focuses on Paris, the fallout from the Nazi occupation, and the legacy of Drancy, the nearby internment camp. All of the characters are, as the title suggests, guilty, and most will be or have already been arrested, in two senses. The narrators (or narrator; they do appear to be the same person) of these linked, autobiographical novellas are conducting investigations like amateur detectives, uncovering facts about each ambiguous figure who attracts their attention. Even Modiano's style, plain but elliptical and carefully wrought, keeps much of the action from view, as Modiano considers the modernization of Paris as a means of forgetting. It's as if all the characters are minor, so little can be known about them. But it is just as likely they have something to hide, even from themselves. Unforgettable.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2014 Booklist

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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.