La Place de l’étoile

By Patrick Modiano, Frank Wynne (translator),

Book cover of La Place de l’étoile

Book description

The first novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014, which with The Night Watch and Ring Roads forms a trilogy of the Occupation 'A Marcel Proust of our time' Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy 'Modiano is the poet of the Occupation and a…

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Why read it?

1 author picked La Place de l’étoile as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This is the first novel by Modiano, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014.  It has been translated into English but with a French title, which contains a pun that can’t be translated (referring both to a location in Paris and to the infamous badge imposed by the Nazis). A darkly comic and shocking send-up of French antisemitic literature, the novel features a clownish protagonist named Raphaël Schlemilovitch who embraces every antisemitic stereotype imaginable, becoming in turn, a cosmopolitan, a traitor, a collaborator, and a pimp before winding up on the couch of Sigmund Freud begging to be…

From Maurice's list on Jews in modern France.

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