The Occupation Trilogy

A swirling cacophony of characters in the tense, nervily hysterical world of the shady near-criminal types who stayed behind in Paris after the Nazis arrived … Powerfully Pinteresque, as characters bristle with menace and barely-contained violence * Sunday Times *
Like a cartoon strip in prose, caricatural and explosive … A disturbing evocation of the terror and treachery of the Occupation, and a mordant reminder of the tense relationship between Jewishness and Frenchness * The Times *
Self-consciously outrageous ... Conventions and pieties are torn to pieces in a manner befitting a book published in Paris in 1968 … The more Modiano you read, the more seductive his work becomes ... Hypnotic and compulsive -- Duncan White * Daily Telegraph *
Brisk, smart, witty, elliptical ... Recalls the directors of the New Wave – Godard, Truffaut, Louis Malle – as much as the opaque narrators of the nouveau roman … Frank Wynne captures this scattergun savagery with formidable bite … Bracing and brilliant ... Deepens the twilit mood of 1940s film noir or mid-period Graham Greene with an immersive intensity * Boyd Tonkin, Independent *
A Marcel Proust of our time * Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy *
Modiano is a pure original * Adam Thirlwell *
Modiano is the poet of the Occupation and a spokesman for the disappeared, and I am thrilled that the Swedish Academy has recognised him * Rupert Thomson, Guardian *
Europe’s home-grown divisions haunt the edgy, atmospheric Parisian fictions of 2014 Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano: sample the three early novels of The Occupation Trilogy * Independent, 2015’s Finest Books *
Usually when we think of French novels or films about Vichy France we think of the heroism of the Resistance. Modiano has a much darker subject: the grey zone of French collaboration. He is drawn to the murky worlds of gangsters, informers, collaborators and black marketeers … This is Modiano’s world as it was in the time of his father in wartime Paris … La Place de l’Étoile is very unusual for Modiano. It’s a shocking, almost hysterical rant by a French, Jewish anti-Semite, Raphael Schlemilovitch. It is nasty, brutish and short. It’s a very knowing, literary work with references to French writers, Jewish and anti-Semitic alike, from Proust and Sartre to the notorious Jew-hater Brasillach … Schlemilovitch constantly changes his identity. Few of Modiano’s characters are sympathetic but Schlemilovitch is easily the least likeable … The Night Watch marks Modiano’s breakthrough … The real change is in style. The narrative moves between a hazy, imprecise world where things are ‘blurred’ and ‘fogged’ to a precise world where everything is described in minute detail. Above all, there is a sense of mystery … By the end of Ring Roads, Modiano had found his voice and was on his way to becoming one of France’s most fascinating contemporary writers -- David Herman * Jewish Chronicle *