Occupation Trilogy

This volume gathers three early novels by Patrick Modiano, the writer awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature for using the art of memory to bring the Occupation of Paris in the Second World War to life. Modiano was born just after the war. He was an angry young man in his twenties when these novels appeared on the Parisian literary scene and caused a storm.

The first, La Place de l'Étoile, was an ambitious debut and one of the first novels to seriously question both wartime collaboration in France and the myths of the Gaullist era. Its epigraph imagines a German officer in June 1942 asking a young man where the Place de l'Étoile is, and the young man pointing to the star on his chest.

The Night Watch follows a young man divided between his work for the French Gestapo and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police. He also shares the seedy world of black market dealers. Ring Roads follows Serge as he searches for his father, who vanished from his life ten years before. He finds him trying to survive the war years among spivs, anti-Semites and prostitutes, offering his modest business skills to people who have no interest in his survival.

Almost hallucinatory in their evocation of the Occupation, the three novels try to exorcise the past by exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance.