Media Reviews
Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti ... [and] as good a place as any to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano's fiction. -Alan Riding, New York Times Book Review -- Alan Riding New York Times Book Review Elegant ... quietly unpretentious, approachable ... Though enigmatic and open-ended, Modiano's remembrances of things past and his probings of personal identity are presented with a surprisingly light touch. He is, all in all, quite an endearing Nobelist. -Michael Dirda, Washington Post -- Michael Dirda Washington Post Haunting... Modiano combines a detective's curiosity with an elegist's melancholy. -Adam Kirsch, New Republic -- Adam Kirsch New Republic A timely glimpse at [Modiano's] fixations ... In Mark Polizzotti's spare and elegant translation, the writing conveys a sense of dreamy unease in which the real, the hypothesized, and the half-forgotten blend into a shimmering vagueness. -Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal -- Sam Sacks Wall Street Journal Mr. Modiano writes clear, languid, and urbane sentences in Mr. Polizzotti's agile translation ... These novellas have a mood. They cast a spell. -Dwight Garner, New York Times -- Dwight Garner New York Times [A] trilogy of novellas from the recent French Nobel Prize winner... Fictions with a moral bite, depicting a world in which everyone, it seems, is complicit in crimes not yet specified. Moody, elegant and dour. -Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Kirkus Reviews The three novellas that make up this exquisite collection are mysteries, albeit mysteries of an existential sort. -David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times -- David L. Ulin Los Angeles Times An excellent place to begin... Here is the bracing darkness at the heart of Modiano's vision of memory and modern day Paris, ... a traveling back to travel forward, a journey these novellas pace with the elegance of a solitary walker, moving through a city's streets, his collar up against the cold. -John Freeman, Boston Globe -- John Freeman Boston Globe Compelling... Haunting... Modiano's unconventional accounts of vanished hours show how the urge to solve a long-lost crime, or to reclaim forgotten memories, ultimately leads to inscrutable vanishing points. -Scott Esposito, San Francisco Chronicle -- Scott Esposito San Francisco Chronicle 'The three novellas that make up Suspended Sentences offer a fine introduction to Modiano's later work.'-The Economist The Economist 'Modiano is a pure original. He has transformed the novel into a laboratory for producing atmospheres, not situations - where everything must be inferred and nothing can be proved.'-Adam Thirlwell, The Guardian -- Adam Thirlwell The Guardian Brilliant -New York Magazine Approval Matrix New York Magazine Approval Matrix There are few modern writers as pleasurable or interesting to read. Modiano is one of the great writers of our time. -David Herman, Jewish Chronicle -- David Herman Jewish Chronicle Mesmerizing ... evocative and nostalgic ... These are stories that continue to haunt, even after the final page ... For English-language readers, this collection serves as the discovery of a unique, masterful writer. -Gila Wertheimer, Chicago Jewish Star -- Gila Wertheimer Chicago Jewish Star [A] welcome translation ... [Modiano's] stories include suspenseful passages and are invariably absorbing ... and offer much to ponder as one proceeds. -John Taylor, Arts Fuse -- John Taylor Arts Fuse 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 Publishers Weekly A series of meditations on the mutability of memory ... [that] accumulates force quietly and veers without warning into the dark precincts of Modiano's life... The writing, translated crisply by Mark Polizzotti, is laced with investigations and speculations, false leads and dead ends. -Bill Morris, Daily Beast -- Bill Morris Daily Beast '[The novellas] are an excellent introduction to the writer, not least because they show quite how much he retreads the same territory...Modiano is as accessible as he is engrossing.'-Jonathan Gibbs, The Independent -- Jonathan Gibbs The Independent Beautiful and fascinating -M.A. Orthofer, Complete Review -- M.A. Orthofer Complete Review Striking and poignant. -Kacy Muir, Weekender -- Kacy Muir Weekender '... the very resonance of the novellas resides in the way Modiano resists supplying easy solutions or proposing a didactic position. The Nobel laureateship has drawn attention to a writer whose work is engaging and thought-provoking...'-Alexander Adams, Spiked Online -- Alexander Adams Spiked Online The voice of the narrator is clear and melodious ... [as] three novellas progressively introduce the reader to the bifocal world of Modiano's evocatively detailed but fragmented memory. Imagine a concert that starts with a sonata, is followed by a quartet, and ends with a full symphony. -Marianne Veron, Moment magazine -- Marianne Veron Moment magazine The three novellas in this book show a consistent, inherently logical artistic vision-a sign of a great writer. Modiano's sadness, expressed in his sparseness of style and in obsessive leitmotif connections, is unique. -Aleksandar Hemon, The Week -- Aleksandar Hemon The Week In poetic prose, Modiano evokes a Paris that no longer exists, yet lingers in the light and shadows of memory. -Jane Ciabattari, BBC.com -- Jane Ciabattari BBC.com The three novellas in Suspended Sentences offer a vivid glimpse into Modiano's photographic remembrance of things past. -Brandon Ambrosino, Vox -- Brandon Ambrosino Vox Like [W.G.] Sebald, Modiano blends fact and fiction, memoir and reportage ... obsessed with unearthing lives buried under the avalanche of time. -Ryu Spaeth, the Week -- Ryu Spaeth the Week Reading Modiano is like experiencing a very specific flavor you don't encounter every day-saffron or asafetida, say. He's direct and precise, but also gently melancholy, like the squeezed essence of passing time. Mark Polizzotti's translation expertly catches the timbre of his voice. -Luc Sante -- Luc Sante Haunting. Like a master perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his unmistakable blend of nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris. In any translation, exotic decor comes easy but to capture the atmosphere of the words is much harder - Polizzotti succeeds beautifully in creating the impalpable magic of Modiano's world in English. -Damion Searls -- Damion Searls 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: New & Selected Poems -- Donald Revell The three novellas included in this volume by this year's Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano offer eloquent testimony to the writer's remarkable gift for evoking the power of the past over human lives and destinies, and the ephemeral and ultimately mysterious nature of human relationships. They also capture Modiano's unrivaled ability to describe in limpid and haunting prose the power of a place, Paris, and to make its history and geography come alive in new and unexpected ways. Beautifully translated by Mark Polizzotti, this small volume will familiarize Anglophone readers with the talent and genius of France's best- kept literary secret. -Richard J. Golsan, Texas A&M University -- Richard J. Golsan The Nobel Prize committee's abrupt elevation of Patrick Modiano to international prominence makes the publication of these three works particularly valuable; not only has very little of the author's work appeared in English, but Mark Polizzotti's long experience as editor, publisher, and translator, together with his truly astonishing familiarity with the French language, has advantageously equipped him to execute his finely-tuned English renderings of these discreetly complex texts. Modiano belongs to one of the great traditions of French fiction, inaugurated by Madame de Lafayette's The Princess of Cleves, continued (this is a very short list) in Marivaux's novels, later in Laclos's Dangerous Liaisons and Flaubert's Three Tales and ASentimental Education, in the 20th century variously developed by its three great Raymonds - Radiguet, Roussel, and Queneau - and, greatest of all, Marcel Proust, and in our own time flourishing anew in the pages of Patrick Modiano and Jean Echenoz. To the thousands of French readers of Modiano, declaring him a great writer is obvious, necessary, and inexplicable: he and his tradition depend on intimacy, precision, and a ruthless avoidance of reassuring conclusions - that is, modest qualities. Modiano's tales are mostly centered on life in outlying parts of Paris during and after World War II; place and time are rendered with alluring exactness, as are their fugitive inhabitants, and all are then inevitably lost in a blur of evanescent clues that leave nothing but an hallucinatory melancholy behind: a melancholy that enchants a rediscovered world with mysterious, hopeless magic. Modiano has said of his work, I have always felt that I've been writing the same book for the past 45 years ; but each novel is unflaggingly fresh, with writing of exemplary purity, depending on nothing but itself for the reality it creates. Now, with Suspended Sentences in hand, you can enter this hauntingly vivid new world. I strongly urge you not to let the opportunity pass you by. -Harry Mathews -- Harry Mathews Patrick Modiano is the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature Nobel Prize in Literature Patrick Modiano, that great chronicler of lost souls, is at his masterful best in these three linked short novels, which have been expertly translated by Mark Polizzotti. Memories of places and people from the narrator's childhood and youth mingle across the years, together with the searing sense that he will never fully understand his own past, nor the stories of his elusive parents, in a Parisi he remembers as still haunted by ghosts of World War II. No living author has rendered the melancholy of incomplete histories and 'suspended sentences' more beautifully than Modiano. Already a revered author in France, he is sure to gain world-wide admiration and enthusiastic readers as a result of his well-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. -Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University; author of Crises of Memory and the Second World War -- Susan Rubin Suleiman These novellas resemble a cross between metaphysical mystery stories and lyrical memoir. Modiano is at his best when his narrators-are they three separate narrators or perhaps only one and the same?-conjure up a remembered childhood inflected by historical figures and real places, from Violette Noziere and Robert Capa to the Drancy transit camp and the Quai d'Austerlitz in Paris. All three stories set the recall of a personal past within the twilight world of elusive father in whose footsteps Modiano's narrators seem forever to be following. Mark Polizzotti's translation catches the tone and lilt of a singularly evocative prose. -Steven Ungar, University of Iowa -- Steven Ungar '... a sympathetic translation of three of Modiano's novellas... reveal the unique qualities of his fictional world which has given rise to an adjective in France, Modianoesque , meaning an ambiguous person or situation... These stories are a kind of mood music, frustratingly inconclusive but unexpectedly stirring.'-David Sexton, The Evening Standard -- David Sexton The Evening Standard 'Suspended Sentences goes to the heart of Modiano's technique, his way of setting up a structural skeleton, then allowing imagination (and imaginative uncertainty) not only to fill in the blanks, but to overlay a new, sometimes alternative narrative on that structure: to create words out of silence and, perhaps, a silence out of words.'-West Camel, 3AM Magazine. -- West Camel 3AM Magazine 'There are few modern writers as pleasurable or interesting to read. Modiano is one of the greatest writers of our time.'-David Herman, Jewish Chronicle. -- David Herman Jewish Chronicle '[The] three novellas published as Suspended Sentences (trans. Mark Polizotti) are terrific, uncanny strange pieces of work about experiencing the past and how to make sense of events.'-Jerome de Groot, History Today. -- Jerome de Groot History Today
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