The reminder artists from Paris – Hamburg Evening Gazette

10.10.14, 06:07

The 69-year-old Frenchman Patrick Modiano awarded this year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Even in Germany he had a boost in popularity earned

From Thomas Andre

Stockholm / Frankfurt. There are few, the tone of the past meet with a pleasant timbre: Patrick Modiano, born 1945 in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, the son of a Jewish merchant and a Flemish actress, is adept plunge his heroes never quite shed layers of memory can be .

Here is the new Nobel Modiano who gets the highest award in 15th Frenchman who can get a writer, a Erinnerungsfetischist, unlike the other rather small form selected. His interweaving of the past with what is present are expressed in slim, narrow books that are not 200 pages long. 30 of them Modiano has published in the course of his writing career. Of them could be said Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, which decides on the choice of Nobel Laureate, “a good afternoon read, eat dinner and then read another.”

A perhaps too witty description – because the simplicity in style Modianos is not to be confused with lightness. It is almost a mystery how resistance is Modianos texts spread before the reader. There are no formal finesse, little doubt as to the narratability of the experience, yet, again and again, violent undercurrents that irritate the life in its flow. For example, in 2013 Modianos published novel “The Horizon”, which is the 60 of a just tender indicated liaison between a woman and a man in Paris. She is pursued by a her sexually interested, coarse types, he (which is equal creepy) of his own, always reappearing like a jack-in, the alleged mother.

Modiano lets his readers in the dark about what is going on with the threatening figures up. His novels call while reading though always sepia-colored Paris-images produced, but a too harmonious nostalgia design would be a fake. The Sooner is not a paradisiacal place, but one who stands with his open questions in the present. With the Nobel Prize for Literature, it was in Stockholm, will appreciated the work, “which are the subjects remembering, forgetting, guilt and identity” turn. Inevitable that committee spokesman Englund also referred to the greatest past addicts among the poets, the one compatriot Modianos happens: The new Nobel laureate was “a Marcel Proust our time”

When it comes to titles like” The Horizon “and” accident in the night “to a decidedly male and amorous perspective in which the impossibility of love expresses itself as unsuccessful search movement, slips which understanding on a gently floating tone narrator Modiano from case to case in a woman’s figure. Just as in the of the again and again for the Nobel Prize for literature brought into play Austrian Peter Handke translated novel “The Little Bijou”, in which a woman in the Metro believes recognize their mother and a detective scavenger hunt of their own past hinterherspürt.

In “The horizon” are the feedbacks arising from the turn towards the past, even more: After the mistress was gone, she finds in the narrator decades later Berlin again, the city of her birth, in which it was returned without a word – both journeys are interdependent. The Berlin-trip by the way does not conceal what Modiano just is for his German readers:. A persistent surveyor of the city of Paris, which sets the city a literary monument, a wanderlust-inducing to Paris Poet

where Paris is never a backdrop, but Handlungsort for Modianos literary program of self-Search: In his debut “Place de l’Étoile” he embedded his fundamental interest in the identity of the people in the exploration of Jewish culture and the stereotypes and negative attributions associated with this.

Modiano is an important and award-winning author in France. In addition, it is not necessarily an insider tip, but would definitely deserves a boost in popularity in Germany. Among German critics Modiano applies already for some time a little, and not only because his choice is not surprising. Modiano had been named in recent years over again, when it came to the Favoritenkür. Accordingly quickly was at the Frankfurt Book Fair at the stand of Hanser-Verlag, in the Modianos work published in German, to admire a perfectly Glamour-promising metropolitan.

A cluster of camera and fotoapparat reinforced journalists who wanted to have a first opinion of Jo Lendle, the new Hanser Publishers. Lendle showed little surprise at the decision – perhaps also because of the fact that last Hanser had always ennobled authors such as Herta Müller, Orhan Pamuk and Tomas Tranströmer in the program. The publication of the next Modiano’s novel “grasses of the night”, as Lendle announced preferred – a logical decision, the curiosity of the reader community eventually becomes so very aroused by anything like the Nobel Prize

Modiano true, like so many of his profession, as shy. He grew initially on with his grandparents and spent his youth in boarding school. The death of his ten-year-old brother was a shock for him. Modianos books between 1967-1982 are dedicated to him.

The Nobel Prize is worth eight million kronor (900,000 euros). Last year, the Canadian Alice Munro it had received in 2008 was with Gustave Le Clézio Jean-Marie last time a Frenchman has been excellent. The award ceremony will be made on December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).