Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano

Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won 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’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his works have been translated and many are out of print.

Yale University Press has a coup in these circumstances with Mark Polizzotti’s translation of three of Modiano’s novellas, commissioned before the Nobel announcement. The novellas originally appeared over five years: Remise de peine (Suspended Sentences) 1988; Fleurs de ruine (Flowers of Ruin) 1991; and Chien de printemps (Afterimage) 1993. In his introduction Polizzotti explains that the third title — literally ‘dog of spring’, figuratively an expletive meaning rotten or miserable spring — has been freely translated.