Patrick Modiano appear at the headquarters of Gallimard, the French publisher after learning the Nobel prize. / CHARLES PLATIAU (Reuters)
His legend humble and simple man precedes him. Prompt appears in the narrow room of his Parisian publisher, Gallimard, to explain his award and she’s obviously having a hard time. Patrick Modiano, Nobel Prize for Literature 2014, is 69 years old and, despite already having major literary awards, is visibly stunned. He is a man, it is explained, used to the solitude of his office.’s Writer
Journalists receive him with applause, but has contracted and sweaty gesture. Would like to gather more data about why the Swedish Academy has chosen him. He says he will use his trip to Stockholm to find out. “That will help me to write it myself on my books.” A journalist reads aloud the jury’s explanation for his choice: “On the art of memory which has evoked the most difficult to portray and revealed the world of human destinies Occupation”. Dice agree with that assessment, adding: “I really like those precise and terse sentences. They encourage me. “
short phrases. Sobriety. Accuracy. They are qualities of his writing certainly loves the author himself. “Mine is a work elliptical style. Emotional sentences for simple “answers when asked what his contribution to French literature.
The simplicity and doubt haunt you. Each phrase of his, always quietly, is a bumbling effort to explain what only seems able to expose the entire text in a protective, the same that make things easier, he says, when making a speech in Stockholm to pick up your award. And with that same simplicity gives reason to his critics: “I have a feeling of writing the same book over fifty years.” In 2009, in an interview with this newspaper insisted on the same thing: “I’ve noticed that I repeat myself: it is always someone looking for someone, or someone trying to retrieve the footsteps of someone.”
Childhood, adolescence, memories last. Are his obsession. Maybe that evokes his youth when asked by writers before him, as Albert Camus. “It seems unreal that I am confronted with people I read of young people who admired as a teenager.”
There Gallimard in the room an air of celebration. Modiano is the fifteenth French writer who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. France can be proud of it. The President of the Republic, François Hollande, has released a statement celebrating the award and has even spoken to him by phone. The Elysee expressed in your letter, made public to know the prize, Modiano’s ability to “explore memory and the complexity of identity.”
But Modiano, told reporters that fill the room, low the field of writing in all humility and anguish of the man who only feels the prisoner while he lives and tries to be a translator; simple but required translator. “I am optimistic. Literature will not die because it is what translates the anguish of his time and therefore will always be needed. ” A need sometimes painful for the author. Modiano’s latest novel was published in France last week. It’s called To not to miss in the neighborhood. is now taking notes for the next. It is the most exciting time, says. Collects feelings, thoughts, facts. Then comes the laborious and hard to put all this in order process, he explains, “and then it’s like a headless turkey continues to walk on his own until he dies and that’s the sad part.”
Peripheral boulevards Modiano won the Grand Prize of the French Academy Novel 1972 with The dark street stores took the Goncourt in 1978 In 1996 he awarded the National Grand Prize for his work. The author of The youth café Lost or Dora Bruder, born in Boulogne-Billancourt in 1945, right at the end of World War II, is now rewarded by the Swedish Academy, consolidating the leadership of France in this award. It asks if you have any idea about such “prominence” but there is such doubt.
Child somewhat abandoned Jewish father, raised by a Belgian grandmother, says she is a member of a generation transition. “We met a little changing in our childhood and suddenly everything has accelerated world. Mine is more sensitive to the change of atmosphere that tries to translate these developments through the book I write successively “generation. Successively and obsessively. Literature as a “refuge” and at the time, as the subject of a permanent dissatisfaction that compels write the next book. So do not believe the American Philip Roth, hot favorite for the Nobel Prize, his promise not to write again. “We must always begin again.”
At the end of the press conference poses awkwardly for the cameras. Not sure how to celebrate the award because, he insists, was not expecting it at all. As for now, yes, it is a source of inspiration, but too close for this to become a literary work. The mystery throbbing in her books takes more away. “It’s like recoil to better focus things. Excessive proximity does not allow a well to do a true literary work. “
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