In 1975, after four successful novels at only just thirty, Patrick Modiano was already sufficiently famous to be asked about his reactions to celebrity:

Ezine: Comment accueillez-vous la célébrité? Comme un encouragement, comme une menace?

Modiano: On ne peut pas parler de célébrité alors que l’audience des romanciers de notre génération se limite auxhappy few. La célébrité romanesque existait au 19e siècle, et si elle a allumé encore quelques feux superbes entre les deux guerres, elle s’est dérobée depuis avec une constance qui force l’explication: il n’y a rien de plus anachronique aujourd’hui que le roman. C’est un art...

All of Modiano’s eighteen novels to date, except for one,¹ are narrated in the first person. It is always the same kind of first person: tall, dark, reserved and slightly bumbling, he is also always engaged in a search for something in the past, either his own or someone else’s. He is the likeable if rather underconfident guide who takes the reader through the plot and on this search, which also always ends in relative failure.²

However, this Modiano narrator is as mysterious as he is familiar. In spite of speaking in the first person, he never reveals much of...

Modiano’s novels are full of dates. The narrators seem to take much pleasure in specifying precisely when certain events took place, whether in their own lives or in someone else’s. Chapters and paragraphs frequently start with a date reference: ‘Hier, 1er octobre de dix-neuf cent quatre-vingt quatorze, je suis revenu chez moi, de la place d’Italie, par le mètro.’¹ Or: ‘J’ai connu Francis Jansen quand j’avais dix-neuf ans, au printemps de 1964 . . .’² These are especially useful given that Modiano’s novels all deal with explorations into the past, various levels of the past, made accessible through long flashbacks....

It is often assumed that Modiano is a ‘realist’. One reason for this is that his prose is representational, full of small and precise details in the manner of the Barthesian ‘effet de réel’. Many of these facts, moreover, have been discovered to be real; they are precise locations in Paris, or a particular brand of cigarette commonly smoked in France. Their authenticity has convinced some readers that the narrative which contains them must be a mimetic one. Another commonly held reason for considering Modiano a ‘realist’ is the combination of readability and alleged non-experimentation which characterises his novels; in...

Modiano is still best known for writing novels set in the Occupation. His apparent obsession, especially in his earlier works, with this dark period of French history has been the main concern of his critics and reviewers. It is certainly a controversial subject: it was probably one of the main causes for the impact that Modiano’s first novels had on the public, instantly creating a reputation for the young author.¹ We may wonder, however, whether there was more to this reaction than that of simple choice of subject matter. What is the nature of Modiano’s treatment of the subject? Is...

We have now seen numerous instances of Modiano at his most subversive. The apparently unremarkable first-person narrator, chronological narrative and realist representation have all turned out to be postmodern subversions of these familiar narrative tropes. So too has his use of historical facts: far from adding up to a historical novel, they result in an uneasy mixture of fact and fiction which has a morally disturbing effect on the reader. This leads us to a question of classification. Modiano’s novels are not what they seem, so we know what they are not: but what exactly are they? To what subgenre...

Modiano may be both serious and playful, but above all he is popular. His novels sell extremely well: they are always on the best-seller lists when they first appear, and even his older works display staying power on the market. What are the reasons for this popularity, structurally and ‘socially’ speaking? Is there a certain novelistic genre or structure related to popularity? What is the social status of that kind of novel?

In our discussion of how Modiano’s novels subvert the conventions of detective fiction, we discovered that they themselves display a marked uniformity of style and theme, their own...