So thrilled to write about Patrick Modiano in the Sunday Boston Globe. His newest novel, Ballerina, which will be published this week by Yale University Press, reminded me of a saying attributed to Henry Moore about the necessity of having a task that consumes you every day -- one that you'll never be able to complete, however. Presumably Moore was thinking about sculpture but what about writing fiction in a bid to exhume the personal and political ghosts of wartime Paris?
Modiano has published dozens of books -- yes, dozens -- and nearly all of them circle a particular time period -- the Occupation and the 30-year-period that followed in France -- and a particular obsession: what Daddy did during the war.
As I mention in the review, Modiano's father was Jewish and on the run from the Nazis. A terrible story and regrettably very common in that period but Alberto Modiano took a different approach: if the Nazis essentially outlawed his Jewish identity, then an outlaw he would be, trading goods on the Black Market, possibly collaborating in odd ways.
In Ballerina, which was translated by Mark Polizzotti, Modiano only touches on such things obliquely but the mystery of his father's existence -- and also the neglect shown both by Albert and Albert's wife to their two children, including young Patrick -- continues to haunt France's most famous living author.
Read the review at the Globe site here:
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