13 Dec Mondiano’s Memories

When it was announced that Patrick Modiano had won this year’s Nobel Prize for literature most people in the parochial world of English-language letters had little or no idea who he was. (Fact: less than 3 per cent of literary titles published in the US – poetry, fiction and drama – are translations, while in Britain the figure is about 4.5 per cent.) But Modiano made a quietly impressive acceptance speech in Stockholm earlier this week. In an optimistic expression of the state of literature he argued spiritedly that the writers of the future “will safeguard the succession”. We are the only bookshop in Penang (we’ve checked) to stock his two titles currently in translation: in The Search Warrant (1997) the narrator inserts himself into this fictive investigation as he scours the records and streets for a missing girl. His journey takes him to his father’s past, his own “running away”, and finally, to Auschwitz. Meanwhile Suspended Sentences (1988-93) is a trio of novellas presents a dreamlike autobiography that is also a biography of a place. Everything Modiano writes grapples in one way or another with memory. This is how he put it in the Nobel speech.

“Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies. Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean”. Someone worth discovering.

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