Why you hadn’t heard of Patrick Modiano until he won the Nobel, and why you must read him now

To the English-speaking world at least, the awarding of the 2014 Nobel Prize for literature to French author Patrick Modiano will probably have come as a surprise. Many won’t even have heard his name.

There is good reason for this. He is renowned in his native France for keeping a very low profile, only venturing into the public spotlight momentarily with the appearance of each new novel. What’s more, few of his novels have been translated into English.

This is probably because the incredibly distinctive ingredients of his universe do not travel particularly well. The poetic, evocative prose that works so well with his fragmented, mysterious narratives, his famous “petite musique”, cannot in translation do the original any justice whatsoever.

This distinctive “little music” is one of the many things that make Modiano’s writing unique. His extensive knowledge of French literature, culture and history is energetically displayed from his very first novel, La Place de l’Etoile (1968). His admiration for Proust and Céline and his love of French poets like Verlaine are a constant in his work. Verlaine’s rhythms can sometimes be seen to infuse his own writing.

Hybrid novels

Modiano views time, memory and the past as the subject matter of all great novels – and this and a fascination with identity underpin his fictional universe. He writes a very hybrid kind of text in which various elements pull against each other generating the ambiguity that has become his trademark. And so the highly literary combines with elements of the detective or crime novel. Historical figures and details from his own life sit alongside the purely invented and the distinction between the two is hard to discern.

Bone author Jeff Smith speaks out ahead of US Banned Books Week

‘You can’t take away someone’s ability to choose what they want to read,’ says Smith, as forces of free speech mobilise for 2014 event focusing on graphic novels and comics.

“The point,” says cartoonist Jeff Smith, whose multiple award-winning comic Bone was one of the books that parents tried hardest to ban in America last year, “is that they are trying to take away someone else’s ability to choose what they want to read, and you can’t do that.”

Smith was speaking as the forces of free speech mobilised in the US for Banned Books Week, the annual festival that opens on 21 September and which, in the wake of attacks on acclaimed books from Bone to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, is taking a special focus on comics and graphic novels this year. The most challenged book of 2013 – the book that received the largest number complaints in schools and libraries across America – was Dav Pilkey’s children’s graphic novel Captain Underpants. Smith’s Bone came in 10th, with the series – described as “one of the 10 greatest graphic novels of all time” by Time – drawing fire over its “political viewpoint, racism, violence”, according to the American Library Association.
“I’ll be honest, I had two simultaneous reactions when I heard Bone was in the top 10,” said Smith. “First, that I was being attacked and I didn’t know why. Then a thought like: hey, this isn’t the worst thing that can happen. A lot of my heroes are on this list. Mark Twain, Melville, Bradbury, Steinbeck, Vonnegut; authors whose work is about something – that do the kind of writing I aspire to.”

According to Smith, this year’s focus on comics “matters a great deal”.

“Comics are now part of the literary scene, part of the discussion, and it shines a spotlight on these kinds of attacks,” he said. “That doesn’t mean the people who want to ban these books are malicious; in fact just the opposite. They have a concern which to them is legitimate. But that isn’t the point. The point is that they are trying to take away someone else’s ability to choose what they want to read, and you can’t do that.”

Doris Lessing's last gift: 3,000 books donated to public library in Zimbabwe

Books from collection owned by celebrated author, who died last year, to go to country where she lived for quarter of century.

 

"Classrooms without textbooks, or an atlas, or even a map pinned to a wall. A school where the teachers beg to be sent books to tell them how to teach, they being only 18 or 19 themselves. I tell … how everybody begs for books: 'Please send us books.'"

These were among the late Doris Lessing's opening remarks when, aged 88, she became the oldest person to accept the Nobel prize for literature.

The novelist was recalling a visit in the early 1980s to a school in Zimbabwe, a country where she lived for a quarter of a century, which she explored in vivid prose and to which she will now bestow a posthumous gift.

More than 3,000 books from Lessing's personal collection are to be donated to the country's leading public library in the capital, Harare.
The bequest includes biographies, histories, reference books, poetry and fiction. It has been welcomed by public services strained by years of neglect and underfunding; many libraries in Zimbabwe have no budget to buy new books.

Bernard Manyenyeni, the mayor of Harare, told the Herald newspaper: "It is most heartening to hear that Doris Lessing, with this magnificent gesture, has taken her love for this country beyond her death.

"We have every reason to feel special to have earned this much in her wishes – we are delighted and grateful as any city would be."

Neil Gaiman tells ghost stories late in the night at TED2014

If you walked up the twisting mahogany staircase of the Vancouver Club on Tuesday, past an ominous portrait of a man in a kilt and an empty ballroom with its curtains dancing in the wind, you’d happen upon a dimly lit room filled with TED2014 attendees. Here, about 100 gathered to hear Neil Gaiman read ghost stories at midnight. Lit by candles and the glow of his iPad, Gaiman invited the audience to gather around him on the floor.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” he says. “It may have been a little while since anyone told you a story.”

But this being TED, Gaiman took a few minutes first to chew on the question: Why do we tell scary stories? He sees them as filling a vital role in our lives.

“Ghost stories are a very peculiar tradition. They’re one of the three different kinds of stories that human beings tell each other that you find out if it’s working physiologically. If your flesh is creeping and you’re starting to feel uncomfortable, the story is working,” says Gaiman. “As long as human beings have been telling each other stories, they’ve been telling each other really scary stories. They’d be sitting there in the cave with the fire burning, and they’d tell each other about the things that were even more scary than the things they normally encountered out there.”