The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l'?toile - The Night Watch - Ring Roads

Modiano, Patrick

ISBN 10: 1632863723 / ISBN 13: 9781632863720

Published by Bloomsbury USA, 2015

Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00097133224

Synopsis:

Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano's first three novels, about Paris under Nazi occupation, now in a single volume; the earliest--La Place de l'Étoile--in English for the first time.

Born at the close of World War II, 2014 Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano was a young man in his twenties when he burst onto the Parisian literary scene with these three brilliant, angry novels about the wartime Occupation of Paris.

The epigraph to his first novel, among the first to seriously question Nazi collaboration in France, 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 second novel, The Night Watch, tells the story of a young man caught between his work for the French Gestapo, his work for a Resistance cell, and the black marketeers whose milieu he shares. Ring Roads recounts a son's search for his Jewish father who disappeared ten years earlier, whom he finds trying to weather the war in service to unsavory characters.

Together these three brilliant, almost hallucinatory evocations of the Occupation attempt to exorcise the past by exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance. Award-winning translator Frank Wynne has revised the translations of The Night Watch and Ring Roads--long out of print--for our current day, and brings La Place de l'Étoile into English for the first time. The Occupation Trilogy provides the perfect introduction to one of the world's greatest writers.

About the Author: Patrick Modiano was born in Paris in 1945 in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and the Nazi occupation of France, a dark period which continues to haunt him. His parents were often absent, and his childhood was spent in various boarding schools. After passing his baccalauréat, he left full-time education and dedicated himself to writing, encouraged by the French writer Raymond Queneau. From his very first book (La Place de l'Étoile, 1968) to his most recent (Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, 2014), Modiano has pursued a quest for identity and some form of reconciliation with the past. His books have been published in forty languages, while his screen plays include Lacombe Lucien (dir. Louis Malle, 1974). Among his many prizes are the Grand Prix du Roman de l'Académie française (1972), the Prix Goncourt (1978) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2012). In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l'?toile...
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Publication Date: 2015
Binding: Soft cover
Condition: Good