Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano – three novellas from the Nobel laureate

He has been hailed as a contemporary Marcel Proust, but Modiano’s investigations into the moral history of the occupation make him a pure original

• • Adam Thirlwell - The Guardian, Wednesday 19 November 2014 

The modern neon city is identical to its ghostly twin … Paris in the 1960s. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty

There are many alluring anecdotes from the life of Patrick Modiano – that his mother had a part in Godard’s Bande à part, and the views of the Louvre across the Seine in that movie were shot from Modiano’s bedroom, or that Modiano once wrote songs for Françoise Hardy – but the most important story occurred before Modiano was born. During the Nazi occupation, Modiano’s father, Albert, who was Jewish, but refused to wear the yellow star, was caught without identity papers in a Gestapo roundup in Paris. He was taken to the transit camp at Drancy, from which the usual destination for its occupants was Auschwitz. But, before he could be transported, some kind of intervention was made and Albert Modiano was released. For Albert was Jewish, true, but he was also a black-market racketeer, with Gestapo connections. That strange oxymoronic status was what allowed him to survive the occupation – and also the liberation: his Jewishness subsequently saved him from any purges of collaborators
More