Patrick Modiano is a best-selling novelist and the winner of some of the most prestigious literary awards in France, including the Prix Goncourt and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca for lifetime achievement. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.” Mark Polizzotti has translated numerous books from the French and is director of the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
“Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti . . . [and] as good a place
as any to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano’s
fiction.”—Alan Riding, New York Times Book Review
“Elegant . . . quietly unpretentious, approachable. . . . Though
enigmatic and open-ended, Modiano’s remembrances of things past and
his probings of personal identity are presented with a surprisingly
light touch. He is, all in all, quite an endearing
Nobelist.”—Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“A timely glimpse at [Modiano’s] fixations. . . . In Mark
Polizzotti’s spare and elegant translation, the writing conveys a
sense of dreamy unease in which the real, the hypothesized, and the
half-forgotten blend into a shimmering vagueness.”—Sam Sacks, Wall
Street Journal
“Mr. Modiano writes clear, languid, and urbane sentences in Mr.
Polizzotti’s agile translation. . . . These novellas have a mood.
They cast a spell.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times
“An excellent place to begin. . . . Here is the bracing darkness at
the heart of Modiano’s vision of memory and modern day Paris, . . .
a traveling back to travel forward, a journey these novellas pace
with the elegance of a solitary walker, moving through a city’s
streets, his collar up against the cold.”—John Freeman, Boston
Globe
“The three novellas that make up Suspended Sentences offer a fine
introduction to Modiano’s later work.”—The Economist
“Modiano is a pure original. He has transformed the novel into a
laboratory for producing atmospheres, not situations—where
everything must be inferred and nothing can be proved.”—Adam
Thirlwell, The Guardian
“A series of meditations on the mutability of memory . . . [that]
accumulates force quietly and veers without warning into the dark
precincts of Modiano’s life. . . . The writing, translated crisply
by Mark Polizzotti, is laced with investigations and speculations,
false leads and dead ends.”—Bill Morris, Daily Beast
“These three atmospheric novellas demonstrate the range of reading
pleasure afforded by Modiano’s approach and the dark romance of his
Paris. . . . Each first-person novella is also a portrait of the
artist.”—Publishers Weekly
“[The novellas] are an excellent introduction to the writer, not
least because they show quite how much he retreads the same
territory. . . . Modiano is as accessible as he is
engrossing.”—Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent
“The very resonance of the novellas resides in the way Modiano
resists supplying easy solutions or proposing a didactic position.
The Nobel laureateship has drawn attention to a writer whose work
is engaging and thought-provoking.”—Alexander Adams, Spiked
Online
“There are few modern writers as pleasurable or interesting to
read. Modiano is one of the great writers of our time.”—David
Herman, Jewish Chronicle
“In poetic prose, Modiano evokes a Paris that no longer exists, yet
lingers in the light and shadows of memory.”—Jane Ciabattari,
BBC.com
“A sympathetic translation of three of Modiano’s novellas . . .
reveal the unique qualities of his fictional world which has given
rise to an adjective in France, ‘Modianoesque,’ meaning an
ambiguous person or situation. . . . These stories are a kind of
mood music, frustratingly inconclusive but unexpectedly
stirring.”—David Sexton, Evening Standard
“Suspended Sentences goes to the heart of Modiano’s technique, his
way of setting up a structural skeleton, then allowing imagination
(and imaginative uncertainty) not only to fill in the blanks, but
to overlay a new, sometimes alternative narrative on that
structure: to create words out of silence and, perhaps, a silence
out of words.”—West Camel, 3AM Magazine
“There are few modern writers as pleasurable or interesting to
read. Modiano is one of the greatest writers of our time.”—David
Herman, Jewish Chronicle
“[The] three novellas published as Suspended Sentences (trans. Mark
Polizotti) are terrific, uncanny strange pieces of work about
experiencing the past and how to make sense of events.”—Jerome de
Groot, History Today
“Possess a dreamlike quality, skilfully conveyed in English by Mark
Polizzotti. . . . All three novellas, though written as separate
works, read like variations of the same wistful melody: each one is
a detective story of sorts, in which the narrator attempts to
uncover a truth about the past.”—Giulia Miller, Jewish
Quarterly
Patrick Modiano is the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in
Literature
“Reading Modiano is like experiencing a very specific flavor you
don’t encounter every day—saffron or asafetida, say. He’s direct
and precise, but also gently melancholy, like the squeezed essence
of passing time. Mark Polizzotti’s translation expertly catches the
timbre of his voice.”—Luc Sante
“Haunting. Like a master perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick
Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his unmistakable blend of
nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris. In any translation, exotic
décor comes easy but to capture the atmosphere of the words is much
harder—Polizzotti succeeds beautifully in creating the impalpable
magic of Modiano’s world in English.”—Damion Searls
“Completely, insouciantly, Modiano describes the interiors and
essential matter of the French literary imagination. In these
fictions, the sworn bewilderment of intimacy as cause and quest and
actual topography of narrative becomes an inexhaustible source. And
from that source there flows a riverine voice of legends and
documentary legerdemain: always candid, always fitly perplexed. In
the three novellas gathered as Suspended Sentences, this voice
elapses across Paris as it never was, yet somehow must have been.
Otherwise, there could be no accounting for acrobats, for Edith
Piaf, for collaboration and liberation and the spring of 1968. All
of these and more Modiano addresses with a luminous bewilderment
more intimately exacting and more precise than any certainty could
be.”—Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected
Poems
“The three novellas included in this volume by this year’s Nobel
Prize winner Patrick Modiano offer eloquent testimony to the
writer’s remarkable gift for evoking the power of the past over
human lives and destinies, and the ephemeral and ultimately
mysterious nature of human relationships. They also capture
Modiano’s unrivaled ability to describe in limpid and haunting
prose the power of a place, Paris, and to make its history and
geography come alive in new and unexpected ways. Beautifully
translated by Mark Polizzotti, this small volume will familiarize
Anglophone readers with the talent and genius of France’s best-
kept literary secret.”—Richard J. Golsan, Texas A&M
University
“The Nobel Prize committee’s abrupt elevation of Patrick Modiano to
international prominence makes the publication of these three works
particularly valuable; not only has very little of the author’s
work appeared in English, but Mark Polizzotti’s long experience as
editor, publisher, and translator, together with his truly
astonishing familiarity with the French language, has
advantageously equipped him to execute his finely-tuned English
renderings of these discreetly complex texts. Modiano belongs to
one of the great traditions of French fiction, inaugurated by
Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess of Cleves, continued (this is a
very short list) in Marivaux’s novels, later in Laclos’s Dangerous
Liaisons and Flaubert’s Three Tales and A Sentimental Education, in
the 20th century variously developed by its three great
Raymonds—Radiguet, Roussel, and Queneau—and, greatest of all,
Marcel Proust, and in our own time flourishing anew in the pages of
Patrick Modiano and Jean Echenoz. To the thousands of French
readers of Modiano, declaring him a great writer is obvious,
necessary, and inexplicable: he and his tradition depend on
intimacy, precision, and a ruthless avoidance of reassuring
conclusions—that is, modest qualities. Modiano’s tales are mostly
centered on life in outlying parts of Paris during and after World
War II; place and time are rendered with alluring exactness, as are
their fugitive inhabitants, and all are then inevitably lost in a
blur of evanescent clues that leave nothing but an hallucinatory
melancholy behind: a melancholy that enchants a rediscovered world
with mysterious, hopeless magic. Modiano has said of his work, “I
have always felt that I’ve been writing the same book for the past
45 years”; but each novel is unflaggingly fresh, with writing of
exemplary purity, depending on nothing but itself for the reality
it creates. Now, with Suspended Sentences in hand, you can enter
this hauntingly vivid new world. I strongly urge you not to let the
opportunity pass you by.”—Harry Mathews
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