As a reward for the memory – Kommersant

Literature Award

yesterday in Stockholm, it was announced that the Nobel Prize by Patrick Modiano received literature. He became the 11th Frenchman to receive this award for its 107-year history. The choice of the Nobel Committee says ANNA Narinsky.

The Nobel Prize in literature (except when it gets to such a “well-known” candidates, as Mario Vargas Llosa), annually causes the same type of shift reactions. First hear a chorus of voices wondered why again bypassing celebrities gave someone unknown and who this winner, all that. Another chorus responds: Wow, what all parochial and uneducated – of these new intellectuals, Nobel prize-winner has long been known and appreciated.

Regarding Patrick Modiano such a dialogue can not be sounded except in his native France – even the secretary of the Nobel Academy Peter Englund said that overseas Modiano know enough, and in the English-speaking world, even publishing deemed highbrow begin articles about him with the fact that outside of the country Modiano is another “unknown quantity” even among the “very well-read people.” (It is worth noting that in Russia this writer, though not also enjoys great popularity, but it is published for a long time and mostly in good translations.)

Patrick Modiano was born in the Paris suburbs in July 1945. His father – an Italian Jew and mother-Belgian met in occupied Paris, and the story of their relationship (and authentic, and later “smart enough” writer) somehow appears in most of his books, the first of which – published in 1968, “Space Stars” – called one of the most important texts, “conscious” holocaust. (It should be understood that the description of the occupation modianovskie far from documentary character – in his own words, he “recreates the atmosphere of the occupation,” rather than the series of events.)

In 1978 Patrick Modiano received the Prix Goncourt – for his novel “Dark Street Lavok.” This is a book about a man who lost his memory during the German occupation and years later tries to recover forgotten. That is the main theme in European literature of the XX century – the loss of memory and its “precarious” recovery – being developed here on the material of the main European tragedy of this century.

In general, the relationship to fascism, as with some general dark past; memory, its loss and recovery; experience of one’s ‘self’, and in particular, their Jewishness – These themes are presented in almost all texts Modiano, including the screenplay of the film “Lacombe Lucien,” which he wrote for Louis Malle. And this is reflected in the explanation with which he was awarded the Nobel Prize: “In the art of memory, through which he revealed the most unfathomable human destinies, and opened the world of human life the occupation.” Some believe that such a formulation, and in general reflect current premium today updating the anti-fascist discourse in general, and thus Europe in the face of the Nobel committee once again asserts its primacy in this matter. Perhaps it is too conspirological and complicated construction. But for lack of a better come down and it.