Patrick Modiano holds in his books the utopias of the past alive. Our utopia loose time need him. He really deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The French writer Patrick Modiano | © Gallimard / AP / dpa
Hardly anyone who starts reading Patrick Modiano, can resist the pull of his prose. With circular motions tried the French, born in 1945, author, the secret past life to get on the track. His prose satisfy simple sentences, sometimes even the mere enumeration of facts. A notation, which still leads to an elegant style and creates a peculiar melancholy atmosphere. A melancholy, which is an expression of tipping against death, against the disappearance.
Modianos books are never nostalgic. In Dora Brother , his most famous novel, he finds an old newspaper in a search screen in the “Monsieur and Madame brother, 41, Boulevard Ornano, Paris’ search for their lost daughter Dora. The newspaper is December 31, 1941 and the brother are Jews. If Modiano tries to make tracks this girl and her parents find, he reconstructs not a happy past, but tried to give at least some of the millions who died in the Holocaust a face and to preserve them from oblivion.
There are always normal, simple people who interested him in his works. People who have no grave and no grave, as the brother who had been murdered in Auschwitz. Here is the danger of forgetting is greatest. At the same time his books not be limited to the attempt to oppose the death reminder. They are also trying to past emotions, past dreams and utopias to save the memory.
A new post-war world
As in the Café lost youth , which also deals with an almost forgotten people. It’s about a woman who is called by the cafe visitors Condé Louki. In old photos, it is always she who strikes first. “She seemed to catch the light more, as they say in the movie business.” Again, the story revolves around the unknown, enigmatic permanent Louki. But at the same time it comes to the 1960s, it comes to life and the dreams of those who meet in Condé and so, as if they were the creators of a new world give their euphoria, each a new name.
It is not difficult.. to find the reasons for Modianos employment with the occupation time and memory. In his autobiographical book A Family Tree , in which he describes his unhappy childhood, he reported from his father, who was a playboy and as a Jew in France survived with shady transactions during the Occupation. The marriage with his mother, a failed actress, was a disaster and Modiano grew only on with the grandparents and then in boarding school. Later, although he has broken with his father, but never betray him. Again and again he tried in his books to deal with the situation of persecuted Jews during the Occupation
The death of his brother -. A shock must
Crucial but have been the death of his two years younger brother Rudy for Modiano 1957. In A Family Tree can be found on Ruby only a few lines, as if afraid Modiano to take this loss into words. “Apart from my brother Rudy, his death, for me, I really think nothing of all that I tell here,” it says. Many of his books are dedicated to the brother, so it was certainly no accident that he has followed for many years the life story of a young woman with the German surname brother.
The fact that the Swedish Academy now honors a writer, in the center of which is memory, is also likely to be a coincidence. Patrick Modianos books are an expression of time, in Western societies, such as Frank Castorf once said, have “no more utopia of themselves.” Looking ahead, in the future, has become obsolete. Patrick Modiano tries to write his books in an impressive way to hold on to the utopias of time and against death and against forgetting
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