Author Profile: Patrick Modiano, the French Nobel Prize Winner You’ve Never Heard Of
Get to know him; you’ll be glad you did
“Nice is a city of ghosts and specters, but I hope not to become one of them right away.” — Patrick Modiano, Missing Person
I was browsing the shelves of a used bookstore recently, lamenting the fact that 500 years from now archaeologists will almost certainly assume (based on the sheer number of volumes that survive whatever cataclysm finally takes us) that our greatest writer was James Patterson. In an effort to find some small glimmer of hope, I moved back to the “M” section to see how many copies of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge the store had in stock. There were only two, a paltry number when compared to the five shelves of Patterson, but a few shelves below Maugham were several copies of another author’s books that nearly restored my faith in humanity.
The author was Patrick Modiano, a giant of French literature and one of the few worthy of sharing that “M” section with Maugham. If his name is unfamiliar to you, you are not alone, at least if you’re in an English-speaking country like the United States or Canada, and for a fairly good reason. Although he published his first novel in 1968, has written over 30 novels and novellas, and is widely known in his native France and…
