The novelist, dramatist, essayist and scenarist Patrick Modiano is the last one to complete the
list of French recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, being appreciated – according
to the declarations of the Swedish Academy – for “the art of memory with which he evoked the
most abstruse destinies and revealed the universe of the countries under occupation”.
In the post-war period, when the heroic myth of the French Resistance during the German
Occupation was actively cultivated, Modiano argues with the myths of the ancient France
and describes aspects of anti-semitism, collaborationism and their traces. Fragmentation of
the approach to topics of national history appears as the emblem of a controversial memory.
The importance of Modiano’s novels is emphasized by his having tackled certain aspects of
the French Past passed under silence, given that few writers have had the courage to reveal
its dramatic authenticity. Within this perverting atmosphere of the Occupation, he brings to
the stage marginalized people, traffickers, collaborators, double agents, resistants, charac-
ters that stand between betrayal and heroism.
The presentation of man in relation to his own memory represents the fundamental idea-
tional feature of the French writer’s vision. Beyond the official history, Modiano imposes
himself as a voice of stories and destinies, making them heard against the forgetfulness of
the amnesic present. Thus, his poetic consciousness registered, examined, analyzed and in-
terpreted the configuration of this space of fragmentary and conflictual memory, completing
it with the interrogations of the present, thus succeeding in surviving through memory.