The Nature of Things

I first became aware of Patrick Modiano, the French writer, when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014 . I learned that he had an extensive and serious body of work and had won many literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt in 1978 for this book, Missing Person . I read that this was considered perhaps his seminal work on the exploration of identity and so it seemed a good place to make his acquaintance. I must confess I found my introduction confusing in the extreme. The story was quite difficult to follow. In the last chapters, the author finally brought all the facts together and it began to make sense but I spent much of my time in reading the book in a fog. That may have been the writer's intent. On one level, this is a detective story; the protagonist and reader decipher and follow the clues, trying to resolve the mystery. The difference is that the mystery here is the identity of the protagonist. The time is 1965 and the protagonist who is known as Guy Roland has ...

Now be honest. Did you know the name Patrick Modiano before it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday? You did? Well, you are obviously much better read than I. I don't recall ever having heard the name before, but then I am certain there are any number of fine writers in the world of whom I have never heard. And every year in October I can count on the Swedish Academy bringing one of them to my and the world's attention. The Nobel is almost always awarded to someone who is unfamiliar to me, which truly doesn't say much for the quality of my literacy or the eclecticism of my reading selections. I did know last year's winner Alice Munro, although to be honest I had not read more than a smidgen of her work. Short stories are really not my thing. But I was totally unfamiliar with the Chinese novelist Mo Yan who won in 2012 and he is, apparently, a very big wheel in the literary world. Nor did I know Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer who won i...