Frank Wynne

The Occupation Trilogy

In Awards & Nominations, French, Translation
T
occupationThe Occupation Trilogy sees the first English publication of Patrick Modiano’s  first novel, “La Place de l’Étoile“. A vitriolic, harrowing, hallucinatory hand grenade of a book.
The translations of The Night Watch and Ring Roads (by Caroline Hillier and Patricia Wolf respectively) have been entirely revised for this edition.

Publisher’s Synopsis

When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature he was praised for using the ‘art of memory’ to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. Born just after the war, Modiano was an angry young man in his twenties when these three brilliant, angry novels burst onto the Parisian literary scene and caused a storm.The epigraph to his ambitious first novel, among the first to seriously question both wartime collaboration in France and the myths of the Gaullist era, reads: ‘In June 1942 a German officer goes up to a young man and says: ‘Excuse me, monsieur, where is La Place de l’Étoile?’ The young man points to the star on his chest.‘ The Night Watch tells the story of a young man, caught between his work for the French Gestapo, his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu he shares. Ring Roads recounts Serge’s search for his father, who disappeared from his life ten years earlier. He finds him trying to survive the war years in the unlikely company of spivs, anti-Semites and prostitutes, putting his meagre business skills at the service of those who have no interest in him or his survival.These brilliant, almost hallucinatory evocations of the Occupation, attempt to exorcise the past by exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance.

Praise for “The Occupation Trilogy”

“…a disturbing evocation of the terror and treachery of the Occupation…”
– Robert Tombs, The Times.

“A Marcel Proust of our time”
–  Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy

“Modiano is a pure original”
–  Adam Thirlwell

“Modiano is the poet of the Occupation and a spokesman for the disappeared, and I am thrilled that the Swedish Academy has recognised him”
–  Rupert Thomson, Guardian

FacebookX

About the author

Frank

I'm an Irish literary translator from French and Spanish, occasional writer, editor and reluctant digital factotum.
Over the years, I've had the challenge and the privilege of translating (among others) Michel Houellebecq, Virginie Despentes, Patrick Modiano, Pierre Lemaitre, Javier Cercas, Andres Caicedo…
I travel widely, and work from wherever seems inviting

View all posts

Read more

By Frank April 14, 2015
Frank Wynne

About Me

I'm an Irish literary translator from French and Spanish, occasional writer, editor and reluctant digital factotum.
Over the years, I've had the challenge and the privilege of translating (among others) Michel Houellebecq, Virginie Despentes, Patrick Modiano, Pierre Lemaitre, Javier Cercas, Andres Caicedo…
I travel widely, and work from wherever seems inviting

BlueSky

Follow me on Twitter