When Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for literature in October, a lot of readers (myself included) were taken by surprise. Until now, he has been relatively unknown in the U.S., although he is a bestseller in his native France and winner of the Prix Goncourt who has published steadily since his first novel, “La Place de l'Étoile,” appeared in 1968, and co-wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle's 1974 movie “Lacombe Lucien.”
Like that film, much of Modiano's fiction has roots in the paradoxes of the Vichy era, which remains, for him, a matter of both personal and collective history. Born in 1945, he grew up estranged from his father, a black marketeer, and has called himself “a product of the dunghill of the Occupation, that bizarre time when people who should have never met did meet and by chance produced a child.”
Such tensions are very much at work in “Suspended Sentences,” a book that gathers three novellas originally published between 1988 and 1993 and now available in English for the first time. “I thought I'd written them discontinuously, in successive bouts of forgetfulness,” Modiano has said of these efforts, “but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences recur from one to the other.
more here.