A friend once gave me a copy of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco in Italian. I gave up at page 73 because I couldn’t understand it. Many years later, I read it in English and realised that there were whole sections that I still didn’t understand. I mention this because I would have had the same reaction if I had read The Occupation Trilogy in French. The three short novels that it contains are all set, as the title suggests, during the Occupation and are centred on the position of French Jews, reflecting Modiano’s own background. They were his first published works and the excellent introduction emphasises the author’s youthful, free-wheeling style as well as his ‘careful obscurantism’. Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2014 and his later work is more sober but this stunning, frustrating book will stay with me.

Patrick Modiano’s first three novels, contained in this volume, are markedly different than his later work. Less controlled, almost frenetic at times. The writing of a much younger man. The three are set in occupied France.

In La Place De L’Etoile Raphael Schlemilovitch tries to outrun his Jewishness by “frittering away” his inheritance, adopting other personas, being an iterant recruiter for a white slaver, “Lake Annecy is romantic, but a young man working in the white slave trade must put such thoughts from his mind,” and collaborating a little bit with the Nazis. The story eventually turns hallucinatory as it appears Raphael comes to a bad end.

In The Night Watch an informer during the war relives his past in occupied Paris. Modiano’s trademark cultivation of memory is prevalent here. “I feel the need to mention such details because everyone has forgotten them.” The memories include places and especially people, introduced by elegant, musical lists of names.
“Costachesco, the Baron de Lussatz, Odicharvi, Hayakawa, Lionel de Zieff, Pols de Helder.” “Frau Sultana, Simone Bouquereau, Baroness Lydia Stahl, Violette Morris, Magda d’Andurian.”
Perhaps those he informed against, wishing to bring them back through recitation. “It’s a strange idea, really, to go stirring up all these dead things.” It makes for a compelling story.

Ring Roads is the story of a young man who tracks down his father, with whom he was close for only a short period of time, and is now the apparent weak link in a loose gang of shysters, double-dealers and criminals. He gets in with the group and doesn’t reveal his true identity – even to his father. Perhaps the fact that his father started him on a life of petty crime and once tried to push him in front of a train has something to do with that. ( )

El lugar de la estrella. La veritat: no la vaig entendre.
La ronda nocturna. M’ha semblat fantàstica. Per llegir més vegades.
Los paseos de circumvalación. La figura del pare. M’ha agradat. ( )

Me pareció algo desparejo el segundo y tercero muy buenos pero el primero era cmo mucho, desordenado hiperbólico. Ahora para entenderlo tenes que hacer antes algo de research de la epoca y de la vida del autor. Trata de reengancharse con su padre que no le dio mucha bola y además era un alcahuete de los nazis durante la ocupación ( )

Ocupació nazi de París.

Su lectura la deje antes de la mitad del lbro ( )