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Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Kindle Edition
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherYale University Press
- Publication dateNovember 11, 2014
- File size1271 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
''Completely, insouciantly, Modiano describes the interiors and essential matter of the French literary imagination. In these fictions, the sworn bewilderment of intimacy as cause and quest and actual topography of narrative becomes an inexhaustible source. And from that source there flows a riverine voice of legends and documentary legerdemain: always candid, always fitly perplexed. In the three novellas gathered as Suspended Sentences, this voice elapses across Paris as it never was yet somehow must have been. Otherwise, there could be no accounting for acrobats, for Edith Piaf, for collaboration and liberation and the spring of 1968. All of these and more Modiano addresses with a luminous bewilderment more intimately exacting and more precise than any certainty could be.'' --Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows
''These three atmospheric novellas demonstrate the range of reading pleasure afforded by Modiano's approach and the dark romance of his Paris . . . Each first-person novella is also a portrait of the artist.'' --Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B00OBL1L84
- Publisher : Yale University Press (November 11, 2014)
- Publication date : November 11, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 1271 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 230 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,052,740 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #859 in French Literature (Books)
- #4,980 in Mystery, Thriller & Suspense Literary Fiction
- #8,366 in Contemporary Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Mark Polizzotti is an author, translator, and publisher living in New York. His books include Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Highway 61 Revisited, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, and Why Surrealism Matters. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Apollo, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Bookforum, and elsewhere. His translations of works by Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Scholastique Mukasonga, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, Eric Vuillard, among others, have won the English PEN Award and been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the International Booker Prize, the NBCC/Gregg Barrios Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. He is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the stories interesting and well-written. They appreciate the spellbinding prose and narrative style. The author captures the uneasy mood and nuances of the complex tales, stirring readers' memories, emotions, and ideas. However, some readers feel the novellas lack suspense and are uninteresting. There are mixed opinions on the character development and pacing - some find it engaging and complex, while others find the pacing vague and repetitive.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers enjoy the storytelling. They find the stories interesting and well-written, with haunting descriptions of thoughts and places. The novels are exercises in remembrance, looking at the 1960s from a 90s perspective. While some readers found the plotting interesting, others felt it didn't move them as expected. Overall, the book's atmosphere is described as intriguing and complex.
"...Suspended Sentences," the second novella, is more frankly a childhood memoir...." Read more
"...But these stories linger in your mind. They also slowly build up, adding to each other to form a powerful cumulative effect...." Read more
"...I found the writing style to be very compelling and evocative of French life and culture...an excellent translation from the original French...." Read more
"...in each story, observing the lives of those around them, barely present in the action...." Read more
Customers enjoy the writing style. They find the stories well-written with simple language that conveys complex ideas. The translation is excellent, and the writing is elegiac, thoughtful, and mesmerizing.
"...I found it an easy read (even in French) and a fine introduction to the author, but suspected that I would need to read more, since the prize was..." Read more
"...that shouldn’t work, but Modiano’s crisp prose style, understated yet poetic, filled with descriptions and phrases as fleeting as memories, keeps it..." Read more
"...I found the writing style to be very compelling and evocative of French life and culture...an excellent translation from the original French...." Read more
"...; Not since Every Many Dies Alone have I been so struck by the quality of writing and immediacy of experience." Read more
Customers enjoy the book's mood. They find the translation captures the uneasy, intense, mysterious, compelling atmosphere. The book stirs memories, emotions, and ideas, revealing themes of longing, passion, desire, and mystery.
"...Patrick Modiano's work and was struck by all three novellas' rather melancholy, quirky tones...." Read more
"...Not happening here but the longing is clearly palpable...." Read more
"...Patrick Modiano has a gift for description and mood setting that is a joy to read...." Read more
"...Mark Polizotti's superb translation really captures the uneasy mood and all the nuances of these complex tales." Read more
Customers have different views on the pacing. Some find it engaging with complex characters and themes, like Modianesque and Proustian references. They appreciate the author's ability to create an atmosphere and layers of meaning. Others feel the story is unclear and repetitive, with vague descriptions and childish phantasies.
"...This is truly a profound meditation on setting and the dreamlike recollection of the past, an elegant reinvention of Proust in a terse modern idiom..." Read more
"...Nothing really happens, nothing is ever resolved, everything is vague, and there are lists that add nothing to the prose or the story...." Read more
"...These three novellas feature all the recurrent modianesque themes, which are also those of Proust's A la..." Read more
"...I found it haunting and liked both the detail and the mysteriousness of the three novellas. Not for everyone...." Read more
Customers find the book uninteresting, with a confusing plot and superficial stories that lack depth. They feel the introduction is off-putting and the book lacks suspense.
"...of three loosely related novellas that are, singly and collectively, pointless...." Read more
"...around a lot in time, which makes things a bit confusing, and somewhat unsatisfying...." Read more
"...I found the novellas repetitive, tedious, and soporific. I kept reading hoping they would get better, but they did not...." Read more
"...about the mystery of human character, there's nothing particularly large or insightful about the stories it contains." Read more
Customers find the character development in the book inconsistent. They say it's difficult to distinguish between characters and details.
"...The secondary characters are often very existential, if not downright strange...." Read more
"...itself but by the time I had read the third I was starting to confuse the characters and details...." Read more
"No real plot. Variably effective character development." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2014Reading these three novellas (57, 67, and 80 pages respectively) was one of the stranger experiences I have had for some time. Every few pages, I found myself slipping into a kind of waking dream, in which the facts of the text would shimmer and rearrange themselves into something that was not in the text at all. Yes, I was tired. But even after an ample nap, I found the same thing happening. I can only conclude that it is an intended feature of Modiano's style. His narrators, like memory detectives, summon the names of places, people, and half-remembered details, but the result is not so much to clarify the past as to cloak it in still more mystery. It always surprised me when I came upon some reference to the afternoon hour or the bright sun, because all these memories gave the sensation of taking place in darkness, under cover of night and fog.
As soon as Modiano's Nobel Prize was announced, I bought the first book I could get my hands on, RUE DES BOUTIQUES OBSCURES (translated as MISSING PERSON), in which a private detective with amnesia investigates the mystery of his own past. I found it an easy read (even in French) and a fine introduction to the author, but suspected that I would need to read more, since the prize was awarded for the body of his work rather than a single book. So I ordered another in French (not yet arrived) and these three in the fine English translation of Mark Polizziotti. The paradoxical result has been to confirm my suspicion about the wholeness of Modiano's oeuvre while still further blurring the nature of it... unless its essence is blur itself. I began to notice proper names cropping up in the novellas that I remembered from the novel, and after a while it became difficult to recall in which of the three stories a person, place, or event was first mentioned. Yet this is not surprising. The place is always Paris, especially its stairs, dark passages, and suburbs where tourists seldom go. And Modiano has said that all his fiction, regardless of its packaging, is "a kind of autobiography, but one that is dreamed up or imaginary."
"Afterimage," the first novella in this collection (though the last to be published), sets down the narrator's memories of a largely forgotten photographer. Meeting him as a young man, he offers to catalogue his enigmatic photos of the Thirties and Forties, shortly before the artist himself leaves Paris and disappears. It is a story less important for the secrets it reveals than for the sad awareness that future generations may not even know that secrets existed. "Suspended Sentences," the second novella, is more frankly a childhood memoir. The narrator (called by his nickname Patoche) and his brother are sent to live with three women in a distant suburb while their mother is on an extended theatrical tour. Their own childhood mysteries (for example about the deserted chateau at the edge of the village) interlace gradually with real adult mysteries about the strange people who come to the house, and mysterious trips into Paris by sports car. "Flowers of Ruin," the final piece, begins with accounts of an unsolved murder from the Thirties. As the narrator tries to investigate it, it too combines with mysteries he discovers in his own time -- such as a Peruvian who sometimes passes himself off as a French Count, but whom the records show as having died at Dachau. The translator, in his excellent introduction, quotes Modiano as saying, "The more obscure and mysterious things remained, the more interested I became in them. I even looked for mystery where there was none."
Although these are not primarily Holocaust books, their mysteries all go back to the period of the German occupation of Paris, which ended just before the author was born. I suspect that many of the names and places mentioned would have associations with older French readers that the most of us miss. For example, there is mention in several stories of the "Rue Lauriston gang." Google the street, and you will find one of the dirtier French secrets of the war. A secret in which Modiano's father appears to have been involved. A Jew, he was arrested and briefly imprisoned, but subsequently released. Why, and what did he have to do to stay free? All of Modiano's work that I have read so far or read about seems to be an indirect investigation of those mysteries. An investigation and an atonement.
"I hadn't moved from the window. Under the pouring rain, he crossed the street and went to lean against the retaining wall of the steps we had walked down shortly before. And he stood there, unmoving, his back against the wall, his head raised toward the building façade. Rainwater poured onto him from the top of the steps, and his jacket was drenched. But he did not move an inch. At that moment a phenomenon occurred for which I'm still trying to find an explanation: had the street lamp at the top of the steps suddenly gone out? Little by little, the man melted into the wall. Or else the rain, from falling on him so heavily, had dissolved him, the way water dilutes a fresco that hasn't had time to dry properly. As hard as I pressed my forehead against the glass and peered at the dark gray wall, no trace of him remained. He had vanished in that sudden way that I'd later notice in other people, like my father, which leaves you so puzzled that you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed."
- Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2014I’ve heard Modiano is an acquired taste, and after this book of novellas (all originally published separately in France), it’s not hard to see why. I wouldn’t call these stories so much as reminisces, meditations on a memory from long ago and seeing what else it conjures up, following the memories to their ends, which are usually brought about more by forgetting the rest or time wiping away any other clues about people the narrator once knew. Despite this unorthodox approach to story telling, I loved it. It’s not for everyone, especially these novellas, which seem to be minor works, and although this was my first outing with the author, I’d probably recommend a more widely known book (like Missing Person, which I unfortunately have not had the chance to read, c’mon Amazon, put it up for the Kindle already!). It’s too bad the rating bar is only 1-5, because for me this book isn’t quite a 5 but a definite high 4.
As others online have said, the first two novellas are quite good. At first they might seem disappointing, as they raise a lot of questions and then end with hardly any of them answered. But these stories linger in your mind. They also slowly build up, adding to each other to form a powerful cumulative effect. After the first story, Afterimage, about a man trying to recollect and gather everything about a photographer who wanted to be forgotten, I was left thinking, “That’s it?” After the second one, about two boys who are raised by a suspicious group of their parents’ friends while their guardians are off exploring the world, left me with a similar feeling, but also a desire for more.
And the last one, entitled Flowers of Ruin, seems to be the least popular of the bunch, but I liked it a lot. What starts out as an investigation into a double lovers’ suicide that happened some years ago instead becomes a reflection of all the old buildings in Paris: all the history they’ve seen that links people together and how these sites are being torn down to make way for McDonald’s and other such chains. This is where the cumulative effect starts to show, as characters and events that occurred in the other novellas bleed into this one—I’ve been told that each Modiano book could be said to be a chapter in one large book, and already after these I’d have to agree. I can see why some might dislike Flowers of Ruin, and there is a lot about it that shouldn’t work, but Modiano’s crisp prose style, understated yet poetic, filled with descriptions and phrases as fleeting as memories, keeps it all fresh.
Final thoughts: if you’re hesitant about Modiano, this is probably not the place to start. If you’ve read one of his better known works and are intrigued, then go for it. I’ve read that Modiano only gets better the more you read by him, and already after just this collection I can vouch for that claim. And if you’re desperate to read something by the author and can’t find anything else, go for it. Just give him another chance if it doesn’t strike your fancy.
Can’t wait to get my hands on some of his other stuff!
- Reviewed in the United States on December 11, 2014These are truly suspended novellas that describe certain mysteries but end before any explicit resolutions occur. The settings are all in Paris and its environs that jump around from pre-WWII to recent times, and they all have strong autobiographical elements from Modiano's life. I found the writing style to be very compelling and evocative of French life and culture...an excellent translation from the original French. However, at times the author engages in mind-numbing descriptions of Parisian neighborhoods, including street names and landmarks, that are impossible to follow for anyone not familiar with Paris. This is probably intentional, but the effect was largely lost on me (and I have been to Paris). The subject matter only peripherally mentions the events of the French Holocaust, so there is no historical import for those of you expecting it. Overall, an entertaining read but not one that obviously shows why Modiano got the Nobel. I'll try to get a hold of one of the few English-translations of his full-length novels.
Top reviews from other countries
- Fredric HendersonReviewed in Mexico on December 25, 2019
5.0 out of 5 stars Proof Modiano deserved the Nobel Prize
Three really wonderful short novels. A great book should be a joy to read and this volume of Patrick Modiano's shorter works is just that.
- Verna SheldenReviewed in Canada on November 10, 2016
4.0 out of 5 stars Lives suspended in mid sentence...
Patrick Modiano places the reader inside the mind of the main characters, viewing the people and environment with all their mystery, suspicion, darkness and even fatalism, all consequences of a treacherous and duplicitous Nazi occupation and French collaboration. Persons and events are revisited over time, revealing ever more confusion due to partially exposed, murky circumstances and seemingly criminal actions. No one is truly what they seem. These novellas taunt the reader with the search for truth and meaning but reveal only suppressed, uncertain memories, incomplete and shadowy persons whose roles, aspirations and ultimate destinies have been blotted out in a post war society.
- Von FlossReviewed in Australia on December 20, 2016
1.0 out of 5 stars like all his other work
Confused and chaotic, like all his other work. I wonder if these books get lost with the translation.
- Dr Mark HallReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 21, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommended - Photographers should read "Afterimage"
I really enjoyed this book. It was the first book I had read of Modiano and was unsure what to expect. My favourite of the three short stories is "Afterimage". The story is told in a simple way and the language is quite spare which belies its complexity, this is Modiano' magic. His writing has the simplicity of Hemingway but the depth of Conrad or Sebald.
- CornerstoneReviewed in Germany on November 13, 2014
4.0 out of 5 stars Shadowlands
A lost time and world so beautifully evoked - so much detail and yet so elusive. A superb translation of these three enigmatic pieces.