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Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas by Patrick Modiano, Mark Polizzotti (Translation)
bookshelves: nobel-laureate, translation, published-2006, france, autumn-2014, shortstory-shortstories-novellas, net-galley, e-book
Read from October 10 to 12, 2014
A NetGALLEY read now selection. Yale University Press. Archive Date Not set.Description: A trio of intertwined novellas from the 2014 Nobel laureate for literature
Although originally published separately, Patrick Modiano’s three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers—each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists. In this superb English-language translation of Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin, Mark Polizzotti captures not only Modiano’s distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose.
Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano’s fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person’s confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano’s trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
AFTERIMAGE
for Dominique
Doorbells, dangling limbs, no one comes this far
Doorbells, swinging gates, a rage to disappear
No dog has his day
When the master's gone away.
- Paul Eluard
Opening: I met Francis Jansen when I was nineteen, in the spring of 1964, and today I want to relate the little I know of him.
Location 22/232: 'Until that day I had never heard of Jansen. But I knew who Robert Capa was, having seen his photos of the Spanish Civil War and read an article about his death in Indochina.'
Colette Laurent, at the Chantilly racetrack, France, 1952.
Michel Lemoine's words about the creative process SUSPENDED SENTENCES
For Dominique
There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a claim to some dormant title or some castle or estate: a claim not prosecutable in any court but flattering to the fancy and a great alleviation of idle hours. A man's claim to his own past is yet less valid.
- Robert Louis Stevenson 'A Chapter on Dreams'
Opening: It was in the days when theater companies toured not just France, Switzerland, and Belgium, but also North Africa. I was ten years old. My mother had gone on the road for a play, and my brother and I were living with friends of hers, in a small town just outside of Paris.
Buster and Eleanor Keaton perform in Paris circus 1954
Le puzzle chinois. Je viens de voir Chester Kingston ...There is a Smoke me a Kipper moment re Eliot Salter.
4CV
FLOWERS OF RUIN
For Zina
For Marie
For Douglas
A chatty old woman
A rider in gray
An ass that is watching
A rope fall away
Some lilies and roses
In an old mustard pot
On the highway to Paris
These things you will spot
- Lamartine
Opening: That Sunday evening in November, I was on Rue de l'Abbé-de-l'Epée. I was skirting the high wall around the Institut des Sourds-Muets. To the left rises the bell tower of the church of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. I could still recall a café at the corner of Rue Saint-Jacques, where I used to go after taking in a film at the Studio des Ursulines.
Jaguar circa 1933
Slices of life as seen through the gauze of time and gossamer of young minds that do not entirely grasp the full meaning of what is seen and heard. A three star by the skin of its teeth. The rating is the splash camera from Afterimage, Snow White from Sentences, and the Jaguar motif from Flowers.
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