ABSTRACT
One of the most popular French authors, Patrick Modiano has put together an enigmatic, interconnected series of novels that each charts an original path between fiction and autobiography. Modiano's writing is highly accomplished because the underlying existential pain is never expressed facilely. Modiano intriguingly leaves the essential unstated; in few other authors are the blanks, the silences and the pauses so determinative. Modiano explores the troubling nature of artistic apprenticeship and the sometimes desperate relationship that arises between a genuine artist and his work. In accordance with Modiano themes of evanescence and fragmentary reminiscence, his characters are intentionally phantomlike, their personalities sketchy. Like Modiano's other narrators, Jean suddenly feels impelled to seek out—to define—what underlies his feelings of uprootedness, orphanhood, and estrangement. Several of Modiano's sensitive, searching narrators one day awake and find that their lives have been shattered into a puzzle—with nearly all the pieces missing.
