The latest work from Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, Invisible Ink is a spellbinding tale of memory and its illusions. Private detective Jean Eyben receives an assignment to locate a missing woman, the mysterious Noëlle Lefebvre. While the case proves fruitless, the clues Jean discovers along the way continue to haunt him.
Patrick Modiano— She introduced me to her brother a few weeks after we’d met, a brother she had never mentioned before. Once or twice I’d tried to find out more about her family, but I could tell she was reluctant to answer and I didn’t insist. One morning, I entered
Patrick Modiano— At what point in my life did I meet Henri Marignan? Oh, I couldn’t have been twenty at the time. I think of him often. Sometimes he seems to have been one of my father’s multiple incarnations. I don’t know what became of him. Our first meeting? It
On the heels of our publication of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s Such Fine Boys and Sundays in August in English, two of his esteemed translators sat down to discuss Modiano’s idiosyncratic and impressive body of work and the distinct nuances of translating it. It is with great pleasure that we present
In the past year, Patrick Modiano has been hailed by American book critics for his Nobel Prize-winning literary art, rightly described as “elegant,” “haunting,” and “urbane.” In books such as Suspended Sentences, Paris Nocturne, and After the Circus, his immense gifts as a novelist—one who melds ambiguous autobiographical and impressionistic details into narratives
Mark Polizzotti— The Paris of Patrick Modiano’s fictions is a city that no longer exists, and perhaps never did. There is a character and a topology typical of his version of the city, a peculiar atmosphere (even when the sun is blazing, the streets seem shrouded in gray), an architecture,
We had the privilege of sitting down to talk with Mark Polizzotti, who, among other things, has recently translated a trio of novellas from Nobel Prize–winner Patrick Modiano, Suspended Sentences, which publishes today. In our conversation, we talk about Modiano, the Nobel Prize, the art of translation, and the joy of
Mark Polizzotti— At first blush, the qualities suggested by Patrick Modiano’s fictions do not shout “Nobel.” Unlike Sartre (the laureate malgre lui), with his grand philosophical pronouncements, or France’s previous honoree, the famously peripatetic J. M. G. Le Clezio, Modiano tends to keep to himself, in narratives that are often