Patrick Modiano and the art of silence

A review of the Nobel Prize winner's Suspended Sentences

(Image credit: (Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis))

Theodor Adorno famously declared, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," a statement that is almost always cited (and misconstrued) to make the opposite case, for the enduring relevance of art in the face of the unspeakable. It is hard to argue with this point, since the Holocaust has proven to be a veritable font of art, both good and bad, in the 70 years that have passed since the end of World War II. But as far as Adorno and his contemporaries were concerned, much of Western art, newly cast in the lurid glare of the war, had become flawed, inadequate, and subtly complicit in a worldview that had given birth to Nazism and the gas chambers. It had to be replaced by something new. For European literature, this project began with those who had lived through the atrocities of the Nazi era — Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Imre Kertesz, Tadeusz Borowski — and was carried on by a subsequent generation of writers born in the Holocaust's long shadow.

One of these writers is the Frenchman Patrick Modiano, who in October of last year was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was then a virtual unknown among Anglophone readers, sending many of them in curious pursuit of the scant few of his books that have been translated into English and remain in print. By way of introduction, the Nobel committee hailed his work in the "art of memory," while others noted Modiano's frequent use of the detective novel form, all of which suggested that he was some felicitous hybrid of Marcel Proust and Georges Simenon. But to judge by Suspended Sentences — a collection of three linked novellas from the late 1980s and early 1990s recently translated into English by Mark Polizzotti — the writer Modiano most resembles is W.G. Sebald, who before his sudden death in a car crash in 2001 was widely considered a lock for a Nobel for his haunted, mesmeric work on the Holocaust's aftermath. Like Sebald, Modiano blends fact and fiction, memoir and reportage. Both are obsessed with unearthing lives buried under the avalanche of time. But perhaps the most compelling trait they share, one so striking as to suggest a larger phenomenon, is the extremely oblique way in which they address their subject, as if their books are mere points of light against a vast vault of depthless silence.

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Ryu Spaeth

Ryu Spaeth is deputy editor at TheWeek.com. Follow him on Twitter.