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Desperately Seeking Modiano

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Desperately Seeking Modiano 22 Saturday 18 July 2015 The Daily Telegraph The Daily Telegraph Saturday 18 July 2015 23 BOOKS published in September), Modiano imagination unfold. “Bob said to recalls his mother as “a pretty The hidden hands that me, you can loosen, open up,” woman with a dry heart” and his said Morrison. An editor must be father as distant, never speaking of as much a psychologist as a prose Desperately his wartime experiences. The boys technician – rather as a sports were sent to live with friends and make masterpieces coach gets his athlete in the right hired help around the country. frame of mind for a race. Modiano shuffled from school to Some editor-writer school, frequently expelled for relationships are more fraught. indiscipline. Rudy died at the age When Raymond Carver seeking of 10, from leukaemia (Modiano published his short story dedicated his first eight books to collection What We Talk About him). At 15, Modiano ran away from When We Talk About Love in home and, shortly after, his father 1981, he was praised for his walked out on the family. minimalist prose. What Despite his chaotic education, reviewers didn’t realise was that Modiano still qualified for an elite although the raw material was Modiano high school in Paris and later the Harper Lee is not the only writer to benefit from Carver’s, his editor Gordon Lish Sorbonne. He lasted one year at was extremely influential in university before dropping out to the forensic eye of an editor, says Sameer Rahim creating that distinctive style. become a writer. By then, he was Lish edited the manuscript so already attending literary parties hether or aggressively that it halved in on the Left Bank, thanks largely to not you length; remarkably, he rewrote the novelist Raymond Queneau, believe that 10 of the 13 endings. who had been his maths tutor. Harper Lee’s Carver pleaded with Lish Through such connections, he was W newly to have his own words back: The slim, surreal novels of an elusive able to publish his first book with published “My very sanity is on the line Gallimard, France’s most novel, Go Set a Watchman, adds to here,” he wrote to him. “If the Nobel Prize-winner will soon seduce prestigious publisher, at just 22. our understanding of To Kill a book were to be published as Mockingbird, or feel betrayed that it is in its present edited form, a wider audience, says Duncan White a place de l’étoile is Modiano’s the hero Atticus Finch has been I may never write another Lmost famous book, but revealed as a Ku Klux Klan story.’’ Eventually he accepted ho the hell attempt to answer that familiar also his least typical: a member – or even both – it is what he called this “surgical is Patrick question: who the hell is Patrick frenetic, hallucinatory picaresque, important to remember that the amputation”. Readers can now Modiano? Modiano? “I write to discover who jumping abruptly between time book is neither a sequel nor a compare the first draft with On October I am, to find an identity,” Modiano frames, locations and narrative prequel but a first draft of the Lish’s version: 20 years after W 9 last year, said in a 1976 interview. That perspectives to leave the reader novel that later won a Pulitzer Carver’s death in 1988, his wife this search inevitably leads back to the dizzy and disoriented. It tells the Prize and sold 40million copies. helped into print Beginnings, obscure French novelist had the most shameful period in French life and adventures of Rafael Lee submitted her manuscript to the original uncut stories. It’s temerity to win the Nobel Prize, 20th-century history. He has Schlemilovitch, a French Jew a New York publisher in 1957, doubtful, though, that the baffling the anglophone literary described himself as “a product” of born at the end of the war. He is where it came into the hands of the unedited book will become as world. Only a handful of his “the dunghill of the Occupation”, raised by English governesses and editor Tay Hohoff, a chain-smoking popular as the one produced by books had been translated into and early in his career he even at Swiss boarding schools before veteran who had joined the firm of that combustible collaboration. English and few of them were in claimed to have been born in 1947, a vast “Venezuelan inheritance” JB Lippincott 25 years earlier. Some authors you wish print. Who was this nobody rather than 1945, to distance from an uncle allows him to adopt a Hohoff said she “found many had been taken in hand more usurping the rightful claims of himself from its corruption. In his grand lifestyle. things wrong” with Lee’s book, but firmly. David Foster Wallace writers we had actually read? work, however, he has repeatedly, The novel is a fragmented recognised that “there was also IMAGES DONALD UHRBROCK/GETTY was brilliant in so many ways Embarrassingly, it turned out even compulsively, returned to the history of French anti-Semitism, life”. She worked closely with Lee, that he was formidably prolific, Occupation in the attempt to and the title itself is a pun: both the suggesting she draw the action Work in progress: wood for the trees anyway – but with some 30 books to his name understand himself better. location of the Arc de Triomphe away from the Fifties back to the Harper Lee’s Perkins helped him along the way. An editor must and a dedicated following in The Occupation brought his and, more abstractly, where Jews Thirties and retell the story of success was Some authors resented the be a psychologist France. Modiano was simply a parents together. His mother, Luisa were forced to wear the yellow star Scout’s childhood from the young made possible increasing power of these French thing we didn’t consume, Colpeyn, was a Flemish actress (l’étoile). Schlemilovitch writes girl’s point of view. Hohoff, who by her editor gatekeepers. Herbert Read asked as much as a like snails. who left Brussels for Paris during essays about French Jewish writers died in the mid-Seventies, did not TS Eliot whether editors weren’t Now, though, at 69 years of the war and ended up writing who were collaborators, such as co-author To Kill a Mockingbird, just failed writers. Eliot replied: prose technician age, Modiano is on the menu. Old Dutch subtitles for Continental Robert Brasillach and Drieu la but she did make it possible for Lee “Perhaps, but so are most writers.” translations are being reissued Films, a studio established by the Rochelle. As he does so, he appears to write the best novel she could. It was a cute response from a but he seemed to suffer from and new ones are in the works. to become one of them, writing Hohoff is far from unique. man whose most famous poem, hypergraphia – an addiction to The publication of The His search to find anti-Semitic pamphlets among the Contrary to the myth that authors The Waste Land, had been edited writing. His 1,079-page novel Occupation Trilogy next month pro-fascist Action Française crowd work best in splendid isolation, by Ezra Pound, and who edited Infinite Jest was even longer in will allow an English audience to himself invariably in the Thirties. The novel’s style the truth is that editors or close other poets and novelists as part of its original form and he only read his celebrated 1968 debut, clearly parodies France’s most advisers have often quietly shaped his job at Faber & Faber. submitted to cuts with great La place de l’étoile, for the first leads back to famous anti-Semitic writer, Céline. great books. James Boswell’s Life In 1953, Eliot’s young colleague reluctance. But I reckon it could time. The edition also includes the Occupation Things swiftly become even of Samuel Johnson would not be at Faber, Charles Monteith, plucked still go down another 200 pages. his second and third novels, stranger. Schlemilovitch works in half so entertaining had it not a novel from the slush pile titled (I for one wouldn’t miss the The Night Watch (1969) and Ring Switzerland as an agent in “the been for the assistance of “Strangers from Within”. It began wheelchair-bound Quebecois Roads (1972), both of which were Nazis (her most impressive role white slave trade”, selling French Shakespeare scholar Edmond with a nuclear war and the hurried terrorists.) When Wallace published in English in the early after the war was in Godard’s girls to Brazilian brothels; later, in Malone. The novelist Edward evacuation of some schoolchildren was writing for magazines Seventies but which have now Bande à part). Albert Modiano was Normandy, he becomes the lover Bulwer-Lytton advised Charles who eventually crash on an island. he had to be reined in for had their translations revised by a Sephardic Jew whose family were of a French marquise straight out Dickens to change the ending of Monteith thought the book should reasons of space. His hilarious Frank Wynne (who also translates originally from Tuscany but had of Proust. In Vienna, he is pursued MERRITT WESLEY Great Expectations from one leap straight to the island scenes essay about going on a cruise, La place de l’étoile). settled in Salonika. During the through the streets by Hitler where Pip and Estella definitely and he asked William Golding, then “A Supposedly Fun Thing In France, he gets on the Occupation, Albert worked the disguised as Captain Hook, but is the cooling and maturation of his Even after the trilogy and the Crossing over: Modiano said after winning the don’t get together to one in which, an unpublished schoolteacher, to I’ll Never Do Again”, is even bestseller lists and is one of black market, and it is not clear spared Auschwitz, having set up a distinctive style.
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