The Content Reader

As usual, you could almost say, the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 2014, was not widely known. Patrick Modiano, is a French writer with around 30 books to his name. Some of his books were already translated into Swedish, but very few into English. I suppose that has or will change soon. The reason for the prize according to the Nobel Committee is "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies." I thought that maybe this writer is a little bit more accessible than a lot of the others. So when my friend Lena asked if I wanted to borrow, 'Nätternas gräs' (L'herbe des nuits) I said yes. It is a short book, and it is about memory. Jean, the narrator, is a writer and he wanders around the streets of Paris and villages in the outskirts, to remember something that happened 40 years ago. He met Dannie, a mysterious woman, who at one point just disappeared. She befriended a crowd of various, also rather mysterious persons, bord...

Yesterday, my friend Lena, gave me a book by Patrick Modiano, Nätternas gräs (L'herbe des nuits).   Quite suitable, since it was the Nobel day on 10 December, and Modiano won the Nobel prize in Literature this year. Looking forward to read it after the holidays. Review will follow.

So, once again, it seems that the Nobel Prize in Literature comes as a total surprise. It went to French writer Patrick Modiano. He has already won several prestigious prizes around Europe. I have never heard of him before, but the funny things was, that Lena from the Book club, the other day suggested a book by a French author. Just checked with her...and, yes, it is him. She found a review of L'Herbe des Nuits  and a recommendation to read. I don't know anything about his books, so here is what it says on Wikipedia: Modiano's novels all delve into the puzzle of identity, of how one can track evidence of one's existence through the traces of the past. Obsessed with the troubled and shameful period of the Occupation—during which his father had allegedly engaged in some shady dealings—Modiano returns to this theme in all of his novels, book after book building a remarkably homogeneous work. "After each novel, I have the impression that I have cleared it all away...