The Nobel Prize Modiano spoke of childhood memories – LaCapital.com.ar

The French Patrick Modiano, Nobel Laureate in Literature, spoke yesterday of the challenges of writing and evoked memories of his childhood. “

The French Patrick Modiano, Nobel Laureate in Literature, spoke yesterday of the challenges of writing and evoked memories of his childhood . “This is the first time I have to give a speech in front of as large as this hearing and I’m a little uneasy,” Modiano said, known for his rare public appearances, at the conference which featured in previous Stockholm to the award .

The writer, 69, said his reluctance is partly due to the fact of belonging “to a generation in which children were not seen or heard only rarely and only after permission. “

The Swedish Academy awarded the prize” for the art of memory which has evoked the most incomprehensible human destinies and shown the world occupation (during WWII). “

The writer said the news that he had won the prize seemed” unreal “. Modiano warned that a novelist “has only a partial and confused impression of his books, like a painter who creates a mural on the ceiling, lying on a scaffold and working on the details, too close, unable to see the work as a whole” .

Modiano debuted on the literary scene in 1968 with “The Place of the Star”, which was part of the Nazi-occupied France during World War II. That scenario became a constant in his more than 30 works.

“Being born in 1945, after they were destroyed cities and entire populations disappear, I should have done, as so many of my age, more sensitive to the issues of memory and forgetting, “he said. The writer talked about his childhood in Paris after the war, in a place called “particular”. She told when I was a kid it was normal for him to be separated from their parents, often slept at friends, in different places and homes. “A child there is nothing that surprised and bizarre situations often seem normal.” However, he said that as an adult tried to put the puzzle together and tried to find people who accompanied him then. “But I managed not locate all the people, places and houses of the past,” he said. “That momentum of trying to solve a puzzle without success and try to clear up a mystery made me yearn for writing, as if the act of writing and the power of imagination could help me tie up all the lo ose ends,” he added.

And in this sense, the writer recalled the Paris of occupation during World War II, since he was a kid back then: “That Paris has always been for me as an original night. Without it I would never have been born, has never failed to visit me and sometimes evening light bathes my books. “