Patrick Modiano: Haunted by Memories

French author Patrick Modiano celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday this past July. His literary output, beginning in his early twenties, has been prodigious: he has written more than thirty works of fiction, as well as co-written the screenplay for the film Lacombe, Lucien (with director Louis Malle), children’s books, and memoirs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014 “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies…” Often referred to as existential detective stories, Modiano’s novels are both atmospheric and enigmatic, combining, as poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch has noted, “a detective’s curiosity with an elegist’s melancholy.”