Ring roads

Ring Roads is a novel by Patrick Modiano, set in France during the German Occupation. It won the French Academy's Grand Prix du Roman in 1972. Its hero is Serge, a young Jewish man who goes looking for his father, Chalva, who vanished from his life ten years before.

Serge finds him scraping by through the war years among black marketeers, anti-Semites and prostitutes. Chalva puts his modest and not quite orthodox business talents to work for people who care nothing for him or whether he survives. The book gives a dreamlike, almost hallucinatory picture of those uneasy, corrupt years.

Like Modiano's The Night Watch, it is both cruel and tender. It is savage toward the anti-Semitic newspaper editor, the bullying former Foreign Legionnaire and the ex-prostitute, who treat Chalva with growing, threatening contempt. It is tender in the way it tries to understand and share the outlook of a Jewish man who fails to see the danger he is courting.