Patrick Modiano

Presents three short novels which explore the influence of the past, the complexities of human relationships, and the mysterious power of Paris over its residents and visitors.

Three Novellas

Suspended Sentences

Cola

I think I personally need to stop reading books that take place in "old Paris." The writing here was hauntingly beautiful but I realized about half way through that I found myself not caring about anything that was happening. I got bored after awhile and that has more to do with the way I feel about the setting of these stories more than a reflection on the writer. The idea of Paris being this interesting and romantic setting in my mind has started to annoy me. Every time I read something from an author in Paris all I can here is "I'm pretentious!" Like I said though, this is more of just a personal thing. Perhaps I read this too soon after The Garden of Eden from Hemingway and still have a bad taste in my mouth from that.

Hellboy TCR

Lily

Jane McCullough

In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume--Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin—represents a sterling example of the author’s originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti’s superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano’s distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose. Although originally published separately, Modiano’s three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers—each appears in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists. Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano’s fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person’s confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano’s trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.

Suspended Sentences Three Novellas