Ruth Scurr

Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano

In a review of Suspended Sentences by this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Paris and the Occupation of France take centre-stage

issue 06 December 2014
  • Comments

  • Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas

    Patrick Modiano

    Yale, pp. 232

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.

GIF Image

Disagree with half of it, enjoy reading all of it

TRY 3 MONTHS FOR $5
Our magazine articles are for subscribers only. Start your 3-month trial today for just $5 and subscribe to more than one view

Read next

Trending

Douglas Murray

The unbearable smugness of American journalists

From the magazine
Polls occasionally appear which reveal the extent to which people trust – or rather don’t trust – journalists. In one last year, something called the Edelman Trust Barometer found that just 31 per cent of the British public said they trust the media, a fall of 6 per cent in a year. This puts the

More on book review

Also by Ruth Scurr

Latest

Comments

Join the debate for just £1 a month

Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.

Already a subscriber? Log in