French author Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature on Thursday, bringing international attention to an author known for his elegant and spare examination of memory, identity and loss.
The 69-year-old Paris resident received the award from the Swedish Academy in Stockholm “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”
Mr. Modiano said he was aware that his name featured among potential contenders but was bowled over by the announcement.
“It felt like looking at a double, as if we were celebrating somebody who had my name,” the author told a packed news conference at his publisher’s offices. “I didn’t expect it at all.”
Mr. Modiano, who generally steers clear of media attention, said he was very moved. “Everything seems so unreal,” he said, adding “he must have been 12 years old” when Albert Camus won the same prize.
Mr. Modiano said he has a special connection with Sweden because his three-year old grandson is from there. “I dedicate this prize to him since it’s his country,” he said.
The 18 members of the Swedish Academy chose a notably accessible writer, who has written detective mysteries, children’s books and short novels of less than 100 pages. The laureate is a much-celebrated author in his native France and throughout Europe, but isn’t widely known in the U.S. Mr. Modiano’s writing for movies has been seen in works including “ Lacombe, Lucien,” a 1974 film by Louis Malle about a young man in France at the end of World War II.
Thursday’s announcement marked a rare feel-good moment for France, which is on the back foot economically and where culture plays a pivotal role.
French President François Hollande, who successfully campaigned to keep culture off the table in European trade talks with the U.S., said the prize confirmed the wide reach of the country’s literature. “The Republic is proud…of the international recognition for one of its greatest writers,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Hollande praised Mr. Modiano for tackling the difficult subject of France’s occupation by the Nazis during World War II. “He tries to understand how events lead individuals to lose or to find themselves,” Mr. Hollande said.
Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, said that while many of Mr. Modiano’s works don’t run for hundreds of pages, they have serious themes. Paris plays an important role in the works, Mr. Englund said.
Just last week, the French house Gallimard published Mr. Modiano’s latest book, “Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier,” meaning “Why you don’t get lost in the neighborhood.”
Several of Mr. Modiano’s books have been translated into English, including “Night Rounds” (1971), “Missing Person” (1980), “A Trace of Malice” (1988), and “Honeymoon” (1992).
Thursday’s announcement prompted Yale University Press to accelerate plans to publish “Suspended Sentences,” a collection of three interconnected novellas by Mr. Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti. The stories are set in and around Paris during the Resistance, said Yale University Press Director John Donatich.
Mr. Modiano “has a really interesting reputation as a kind of reclusive figure who also just writes exquisite and simple prose,” Mr. Donatich added. “The mood is what people really come away with and a sense of this quiet voice and a sort of gauzy texture.”
In the author’s hands, “things are quite tentative, the world is ever shifting and the things that you value and love are ever on the brink of being lost,” Mr. Donatich said. “The sentences are disarmingly simple but as you read them over and over again they reveal a sort of deeper emotion.”
“Suspended Sentences” is “in galleys right now,” Mr. Donatich said. “We’re hoping to have finished copies within a few weeks. It was supposed to be on our spring list but obviously we’re doing everything we can to rush the pub date.” The publisher hopes to issue the book in November rather than, as planned earlier, in February 2015.
Mr. Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris in 1945. His mother was a Belgian actress and his father, a businessman, was of Jewish-Italian heritage. His parents met during the German occupation in Paris, and those years often make their way into his fiction.
His 1968 debut novel, “La place de l’étoile,” follows a Jewish collaborator during WWII and has yet to be published in English. Another work, “Dora Bruder,” published in English in 1999, developed out of a 1941 missing person’s ad for a 15-year-old girl that the author came across in the late 1980s. He often mixes fiction and autobiography, as in his 2005 work “Un Pedigree,” which delves into his childhood.
Nathalie Crom, a French journalist who has interviewed Mr. Modiano half a dozen times, said the author doesn’t like giving interviews.
“He is known to start sentences that he never ends” as he searches for the precise word he’s looking for, Ms. Crom said. “It’s difficult for him. He is so precise when he writes.”
She said that for four decades, Mr. Modiano has explored the same themes, unmoved by debates about literature among critics and writers.
For a reader not yet familiar with Mr. Modiano’s work, Mr. Englund recommended his 1978 detective novel, “Missing Person.”
Mr. Modiano “is very fond of the detective genre and he plays with it,” Mr. Englund said. “It’s the story of a detective who has lost his memory. He’s tracing his own steps through history to find out who he is. It’s a fun book. He’s playing with the genre, but he’s still saying something fundamental about history and time.”
The French author “has a very special art of memory and how it works,” Mr. Englund added. “He is sort of possessed with his attempts to reach back in time…and you can identify with these attempts.”
France last claimed a Nobelist for writing six years ago, when Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was honored.
Dominique Bourgois, who heads the French publishing house Éditions Bourgois, was thrilled by the news. “He’s well-loved in France,” she said. “He’s a brilliant craftsman, very gifted, very unique. It’s well-deserved.”
“I think it’s very good for booksellers, too,” Ms. Bourgois added. “It’s an easy read—intelligent, excellent books.”
The Nobel Prize in literature comes with an 8 million-kronor ($1.1 million) award. It has been awarded by the Swedish Academy since 1901.
“This time, the Nobel is recognizing a writer who is both popular and very respected in his own country and abroad,” said Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, who called Mr. Modiano “easily one of the best-known living French writers.”
On Wednesday, the odds for the French novelist to win narrowed to 10/1 as last-minute bets were placed, according to the betting website Ladbrokes. LAD.LN -2.15%Other favorites included Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Japanese author Haruki Murakami.
Mr. Modiano said he would travel to Stockholm to receive the prize. Asked whether he intends to deliver a speech, the shy author, who has confessed to suffering from stage fright, said: “As long as it is about reading a prepared text, that doesn’t scare me.”
Culled from The Wall Street Journal