Patrick Modiano is a French writer. In 2014, he won the Nobel prize because his writing mastered:
the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the [Nazi] occupation.
A partial list of his work includes:
Missing Person, in which a detective with amnesia looks for…himself.
Dora Bruder, detailing Modiano’s 10 year search for a missing girl, who he discovered had been deported to Auschwitz. The book is part memoir, part fiction, and reveals a dark time in occupied France.
The Place of the Star, his first book, features a Jewish swindler as the narrator, who takes us through a melancholy tour of occupied France. The title refers to both the start Jews had to wear and a Paris Square.
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