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Loading... Place de l'Étoile (original 1968; edition 2014)by Patrick Modiano (Author), Cai Melin (Translator), Lena Melin (Translator)
Work InformationLa Place de l'étoile by Patrick Modiano (Author) (1968)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. What a fulminant first work. Patrick Modiano is so speech-wielding. Raphaël Schlemilovitch is a kind of masquerader who wants to please everyone and wants to enjoy his own life, but in the end he fails and ends up in a mental hospital. The stories are jumping around in the historical time, one is before WWII, then during the war and then again after the war, but never in the correct order. Raphël slips into various roles, compares himself with well-known writers, imitates them and writes himself. ( ) no reviews | add a review
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This astonishing first novel by one of France's greatest living writers was among the earliest to seriously question both wartime collaboration in France and the myths of the Gaullist era. The epigraph reads- In June 1942 a German officer goes up to a young man and says- 'Excuse me, monsieur, where is La Place de l'.toile?' The young man points to the star on his chest. The narrator of this wild and whirling satire is a hero on the edge, who imagines himself in Paris under the German Occupation. Through his mind stream a thousand different possible existences, where sometimes the Jew is king, sometimes a martyr, and where tragedy disguises itself as farce. Real and fictional characters from Maurice Sachs and Drieu La Rochelle, Marcel Proust and the French Gestapo, Captain Dreyfus and the Petainist admirals, to Freud, Hitler and Eva Braun spin past our eyes. But at the centre of this whirligig is La Place de l'.toile, the geographical and moral centre of Paris, the capital of grief. With La Place de l'.toile Patrick Modiano burst onto the Parisian literary scene in 1968, winning two literary prizes, and preparing the way for the next two books - The Night Watch and Ring Roads - in what is regarded as his trilogy of the Occupation. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)843.92Literature French French fiction Modern Period 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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