Trilogía de la Ocupación

Trilogie « de l'Occupation » #1-3

by Patrick Modiano, María Teresa Gallego Urrutia (Translator), José Carlos Llop (Prologue)

Este volumen reúne las tres primeras novelas de un autor fundamental de las letras francesas contemporáneas. Tres novelas que recibieron numerosos galardones –entre ellos el Gran Premio de la Academia Francesa– y que representan el primer y más brillante bisturí novelístico de la turbiedad, la complicidad social y la fantasmagoría, del antisemitismo, el crimen organizado y la fiesta de algunos en este negro período del siglo XX francés. Concretamente del París ocupado, su gestación y consecuencias. Entre el delirio, el sueño y la falsificación desfilan todos los fantasmas de la época. Entre ellos, el padre –ese eterno modianesco–, una banda criminal que gira en su provecho la amenaza del enemigo y la locura ideo­lógica –retrato del soporte intelectual de aquellos años– de un judío antisemita. Y todo ello contado, en palabras de José Carlos Llop, prologuista a esta edición, «como si Scott Fitzgerald y Dostoievski salieran de correría nocturna y en vez de bares hubieran visitado varios círculos del infierno con un espíritu entre la frescura fitzgeraldiana y el fatalismo nihilista del ruso, mezclado con cierta atmósfera a lo Simenon». Un libro absolutamente imprescindible.

Genres: Fiction, France, Historical Fiction, World War II, Literature, 20th Century, French Literature

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Patrick Modiano is a French-language author and playwright and winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature.

He is a winner of the 1972 Grand prix du roman de l'Académie française, and the 1978 Prix Goncourt for his novel "Rue des boutiques obscures".

Modiano's parents met in occupied Paris during World War II and began a clandestine relationship. Modiano's childhood took place in a unique atmosphere: with an absent father -- of which he heard troubled stories of dealings with the Vichy regime -- and a Flemish-actress mother who frequently toured. His younger brother's sudden death also greatly influenced his writings.

While he was at Henri-IV lycee, he took geometry lessons from writer Raymond Queneau, who was a friend of Modiano's mother. He entered the Sorbonne, but did not complete his studies.

Queneau, the author of "Zazie dans le métro", introduced Modiano to the literary world via a cocktail party given by publishing house Éditions Gallimard. Modiano published his first novel, "La Place de l’Étoile", with Gallimard in 1968, after having read the manuscript to Raymond Queneau. Starting that year, he did nothing but write.

On September 12, 1970, Modiano married Dominique Zerhfuss. "I have a catastrophic souvenir of the day of our marriage. It rained. A real nightmare. Our groomsmen were Queneau, who had mentored Patrick since his adolescence, and Malraux, a friend of my father. They started to argue about Dubuffet, and it was like we were watching a tennis match! That said, it would have been funny to have some photos, but the only person who had a camera forgot to bring a roll of film. There is only one photo remaining of us, from behind and under an umbrella!" (Interview with Elle, 6 October 2003). From their marriage came two girls, Zina (1974) and Marie (1978).

Modiano has mentioned on Oct 9, 2014, during an interview with La Grande Librairie, that one of the books which had a great impact on his writing life was 'Le cœur est un chasseur solitaire' (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter), the first novel published by Carson McCullers in 1940.

(Arabic: باتريك موديانو)

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma]

Patrick Modiano’s Occupation Trilogy is comprised of his first three novels, published when he was 22, 23 and 25. Very different feel to this work than later, "more mature," work. This feels frenetic in comparison, angry, a different style, infused with direct and indirect references to other authors. Later work is more minimal, for sure, sadder (versus madder), and shadowy, noir. The work of a young man. Bombastic, showing off a bit.

Of these three books I only read La Place de l’Étoile (1968), his first published novel, which had some real popular and critical success as what some think is the first novel about the (Nazi) Occupation of the City of Light, Paris. I read this first book (in a one volume collection of all three of them) in summer, 2024, but struggled to finish it. It is dark social satire, very harsh on those fellow Frenchmen who were revealed to have sold out France to collaborate with, or curry favor with, the Nazi invaders. I just prefer the later books as a more muted, sadder (versus madder) way of representing the Occupation, which is the heart of all of his work, the thing taht earned him the Nobel Prize i Literature. So I just began book two, saw it was the same basic ranting tone, and I abandoned it.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Occupation Trilogy

Patrick Modiano won the Nobel prize in literature in 2014 and truthfully, I had never heard of him. Curiously one day at a box book store, I found this book. It's a trilogy with a common theme - French collaboration with the Nazis during the Occupation. That, I bought, might not be easy stuff to digest, but he did win the Nobel prize so it must count for something?

And "count for something" is perhaps an understatement. At first I cannot deny I was getting a lot of resistance in my mind. It was very uncomfortable and challenged some of my views about the war, the other side, the victims and yes, those who "turned sides." For some this may seem wrong or pushing boundaries. But what moved me along was the words. My God, Patrick Modiano via the translator, Frank Wynne made the words speak. The images were so vivid. He has been compared to Marcel Proust (still have to read him) and if so, this is marvellous literature.

The opening story, "La Place de L'Étoile" was his groundbreaking novel, written in 1968. It flows from the heart, the mind, angry, free flowing, typical of the great writers of this time like Spaniard Juan Goytisolo (Señas de identidad) or Argentinian Julio Cortázar (Rayuela). I loved it. I hated it. A lot of anti-Semitic words, anger, cruelty. The collaborators were sleezy, out for themselves; saving themselves, preying off the rich; the rich got out while committing treacherous acts. Wow it was hard to stomach but the words.... ooh la la.

The name translated, "The Square of the Star" has been renamed to Place Charles de Gaulle with its iconic "Arc de Triomphe." But the name has a more sinister connotation, the yellow badge placed on the coats of the Jews.

I paused. Shall I read on? The next novel, The Night Watch was told from a different perspective. A man playing both sides. I was starting to wonder? The last story, "Ring Roads" is the story of a man trying to save his father who was involved with the wrong side. This story was never published in America till this edition, and I loved this story. There is a humanity here.

Mediano takes us through the various sides and issues of the Nazi collaborators. He doesn't take sides, doesn't question and yet he leaves us lots to ponder. I am not a big fan of war literature but this angle was unique for me. I have been reading a few books on the Spanish Civil War and that was confusing at best. This seems so much more straight forward. And yet, it really wasn't. No heroics, good and bad are really thin lines. Perhaps this is closer to the truth?

On a side note, Dwight Garner, reviewing for the New York Times calls him a "flâneur of consciousness, strolling purposefully through Paris's cache of memories as well as his own." Wow, this is apt. The flâneur, or a person who loves to stroll through the city is captured throughout the streets of Paris. It was worth the stroll.

Would go with 4.5 stars

[Javier Avilés · Rating 2 out of 5]

Esta es la segunda oportunidad que le doy a Modiano. Al ser tres novelas es la segunda, la tercera y la cuarta oportunidad. Y la última.
No es mal escritor. En estas primeras novelas tiene elementos narrativos muy interesantes desarrollados de manera un tanto arriesgada y medrosa al mismo tiempo.
Bien.
El problema no es lo que escribe, ni cómo lo escribe ni si con el tiempo sería justo merecedor del Nobel o no.
El problema, mi problema, es que nada de lo que escribe me interesa. Y ese es un precipicio que no se puede saltar.
Demasiado local para mi gusto.
Hay escritores que trascienden las fronteras de su territorio y su lengua y otros que se apegan al terruño.
Pues para ellos su terruño, llámese París, llámese Barcelona o Cuenca.

[AC · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some months ago I read Missing Person and Suspended Sentences and loved both, and recommend starting with those. This is not nearly as good. The Trilogy was written when Modiano, a follower of Raymond Queneau, was very young -- La Place at the age of 22, Night watch two years later... -- La Place is a hallucinatory, Blaise Cendrars-L.-F. Céline inspired parody of a Bagatelle-style, Commedia dell' arte romp through fascist circles (mostly historical figures -- lots of name dropping) in Occupied France. Little plot, little character... Night Watch is even more obscure, and I gave up half-way.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the first book of the Trilogy very hard going despite having read Modiano's autobiography and knowing a lot of French wartime/occupation history. Without that, I would have been lost. This is the first book written/published by a very young author. The second two books were easier going and rated the "4*" rating. These books were written in the 60's, when many people were still not ready to honestly discuss the War; everyone - apparently/supposedly - had been in the Resistance. But Modiano knew that was not so; he had been raised in a world that was peopled by unscrupulous people (including his parents)who had managed to get through the War in various socially unacceptable ways - but they did survive. So a lot of their stories are represented in these short books, as is the rather unbelievable way Modiano got through his youth and young adulthood. All very fascinating. And unusual.

[naturaespecies · Rating 1 out of 5]

Leído el primero de los tres libros, «El lugar de la estrella». Se me han quitado las ganas de leer los otros dos.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finding His Way in a Forest of Names

This collection of Modiano's first three novels, each with a different English translator, marks the ninth and tenth books by him that I have read; earlier this year, I read the first of the three, La Place de l’Étoile (1968), in French. I am not sure that it makes much sense to call them "The Occupation Trilogy," since every Modiano book I have read, from the first to the most recent, reaches back to the legacy of the 1940–44 German occupation. But these three are actually set during that period, if you can talk of period for books this surreal. And all three feature as protagonist a young man in his late teens or twenties, not much younger than Modiano himself when he burst upon the French literary scene.

As does Modiano's screenplay for Louis Malle's 1974 film Lacombe, Lucien, which would be his fourth major work of fiction. The novelist William Boyd, in his compact and helpful introduction to the present volume, makes the case that one should consider this also, making a tetralogy. Although the film is hardly surreal, it offers the clearest statement of the theme that pervades all of Modiano's early work: French collaboration during the war. Its young hero, rejected by the Resistance, instead joins the milice (the French arm of the Gestapo), becoming a collaborator with equal ease. This is very much the situation of the young man in the second of these three volumes, The Night Watch (La ronde de nuit, 1969), an angel-faced youth who becomes a double-agent charged by the sinister group of collaborators to whom he has attached himself, to join and ultimately betray an equally shadowy Resistance cell. The young man in Ring Roads (Les boulevards de ceinture, 1972) is in search of his father, a Jewish black-marketeer, who is the catspaw of another bizarre group of collaborators, living in luxurious country houses vacated by their true owners "in view of the circumstances." This situation most clearly parallels the search that Modiano has been making all his life, to understand his own father who, though a Jew, also employed his criminal skills to line his own pockets while aiding the work of the Germans.

But these are in no way spy stories. Not a single German appears in either of the last two books, and the names that are conjured up in the first of them, including Hitler and Eva Braun, are only a few of the dozens of personages, real and imaginary, hurled about in a surreal fantasy that the author has called "a carousel spinning madly through space and time." The density of names, literary and historical references, makes this a difficult book to read. This translation by Frank Wynne contains ten pages of notes that I only wish I had had when tackling the book in French. Neither of the other two novels has notes, but I suspect that fewer of the characters are real, although the density of names is almost as great; here are a few lines from The Night Watch:

This avenue, which seems majestic from afar, is one of the vilest sections of Paris. Claridge, Fouquet, Hungaria, Lido, Embassy, Butterfly… at every stop I meet new faces: Costachesco, the Baron de Lussatz, Odicharvi, Hayakawa, Lionel de Zieff, Pols de Helder… Flashy foreigners, abortionists, swindlers, hack journalists, shyster lawyers and crooked accountants who orbited the Khedive and Monsieur Philibert. Added to their number was a whole battalion of women of easy virtue, erotic dancers, morphine addicts… Frau Sultana, Simone Bouquereau, Baroness Lydia Stahl, Violette Morris, Magda d'Andurian…" [the ellipses are the author's own].

It is tempting to dismiss all these as fantasy, or rather as the exotic pseudonyms adopted by low-lifes trying to fly under the radar by sailing so flamboyantly above it. But Violette Morris at least is real: she was a celebrated athlete, the transvestite Amazon who appears in the famous Brassaï photo that inspired Francine Prose's recent novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club. And S. Lillian Kremer's encyclopedia Holocaust Literature identifies five of the leading characters in Ring Roads as known collaborators, editors, and journalists of the time with only the most transparent changes to their names. For Frenchmen reading while memories were still sore, these early books of Modiano's must have touched a nerve, dropping hints of scandal before darting for cover among the thickets of fantasy. For American or English readers today, they have few such associations.

Nonetheless, the books are fascinating, not so much for their orgies of name-dropping (a Proust high on cocaine) as because they show the young Modiano becoming the author we know from the rest of his work. As William Boyd points out, the three novels become progressively less surreal, their sentences get shorter, and their style less flamboyant. And, in Ring Roads especially, the names of people get gradually replaced by lists of places:

In the Sentier, that exotic principality formed by the Place du Caire, the Rue du Nil, the Passage Ben-Aiad and the Rue d'Aboukir, I thought about my poor father. The first four arrondissements sub-divide into a tangled multitude of provinces whose unseen borders I eventually came to know. Beaubourg, Greneta, le Mail, la Pointe Sainte-Eustache, les Victoires…".

What's the difference, you may ask? But those who know Modiano will also know his uncanny ability to conjure a dense web of associations from the atmosphere, indeed the mere names, of places, much like his contemporary WG Sebald. Many of his later books—among them Rue des boutiques obscures, Quartier perdu, and especially his masterpiece Dora Bruder —will take us on walks into the lost quarters of Paris, conjuring an atmosphere of loneliness and loss, the archaeology of an unspeakable past. Already in passages like this, from near the end of this volume, you can hear the melancholy voice of the essential Modiano:

Remember our Sunday walks, Baron? From the centre of Paris, we drifted on a mysterious current all the way to the ring roads. Here the city unloads its refuse and silt. Soult, Massena, Davout, Kellermann. Why did they give the names of conquering heroes to these murky places? But this was ours, this was our homeland.

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

La Place de l'Etoile: Excellent! Quite a hoot. Reminded me a bit of Naked Lunch in satirical absurdity. A send up of all things French as constructed through Antisemitism and Orientalism, cultural cliche, propaganda, and hypocrisy. Almost not funny anymore when he goes to Israel as a bit too true maybe. I understand this first salvo is rather unlike Modiano's later novels so excited to move on.

The Night Watch Begins beautifully if a bit vaguely in an inexplicable medias res filled with characters we learn only a little bit about on the fly; but, more than that, I thought I was in that Nouveau Roman territory of which the introduction spoke, and I was quite enjoying the non-linear narration of mysterious events and shady characters until, at about the halfway point, the narrative shifted into pure exposition and gave itself wholly to the classic novel tradition. Sadly, it borders here and there on melodrama. Great but flawed--as if Modiano chickened out halfway through and decided to explain everything before rushing through to the ending.

Ring Roads is probably the best pure narrative here, given the dream-like flights of fancy of La Place de l'Etoile. The form is still just a tad clumsy, beginning well in medias res again and then occasionally falling into pure character description, as if the young Modiano hadn't quite figured out how to blend the two techniques better. Later there's a lengthy flashback, however, which comes at the perfect time as I'm only really noticing it now, in retrospect--I was wholly captivated at the time. Still, this third novel felt formerly more of a piece and sophisticated than The Night Watch, even if I feel a bit more affection, I suppose, for some of the images and the extra lost character there--melodramatic as the prose occasionally was.

Ring Roads, even more explicitly than the other two novels, tackles the complexities of the father/son relationship that apparently stands behind most of Modiano's writing, his attempts to reconstruct the life of his father during the war and his own relationship to "the sins of the fathers," made, I suppose, extra important given the WWII background, the Jewishness he inherited from his father, and French antisemitism and collaboration with the Nazis during the war. Thus, again, this is the most complete, polished, and realized of the two more narrative novels included here, but something about The Night Watch hangs with me more, despite my criticisms of its form.

I also need to note that this edition is filled with grammatical errors--mostly verb conjugations "He go" and "I goes" variety, which I assume is just bad or nonexistent proofreading. Also--and perhaps this is a tick of Modiano's? or bad translating?--both of the second and third novels go back and forth between past and present tense. I'm all for breaking rules for dramatic effect, but I only found it distracting, not really evocative. Even if it is a feature of Modiano's writing, and perhaps works better in French, for the English, the translator might have done better to simply choose a tense and stick with it.

[Annette · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are not easy to read so happily these three novellas are short.

The storytelling is elliptical and surreal, and my best advice is to try and relax and go with the flow.

There is also a bitterness (completely understandable) and a sinister almost diabolical tone to the novels. He perfectly conveys in a very unusual way what it must have felt like, (and probably still does feel like today) to be Jewish in France during the occupation. The distrust, distain and hatred, the danger and the visceral response of pure French and Arayans to anyone Jewish under the Nazi occupation.

This is not a fun read and there's no point expecting it to be one, but it is a fascinating roller coaster experience that leaves you enlightened though saddened.

[Taylor Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Early novels of Modiano’s that bristle with youthful verve. They are at once quite at odds with the Modiano of later years, for whom paucity of language weaves delicacy of atmosphere, and at the same time very clearly the seed from which grew his oeuvre, concerned as they are with memory, characters that prefer their hovering to accord with fringes of normative society, the innuendo of crime, and identity.

[Marina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Al final me ha acabado gustando, pero es complicado de leer sin ayuda

[Francisco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Las novelas recogidas en esta trilogía, "La plaza de la estrella", "La ronda de noche" y "Los paseos de circunvalación" pretenden ser, según las opiniones de los sesudos críticos literarios, una aproximación lúcida y dolorosa al periodo de la ocupación nazi de París.
En mi modesta opinión, no es muy lúcida, y es dolorosa para el lector, que intenta buscar infructuosamente puntos de apoyo entre las imágenes chocantes que el autor parece sembrar de manera errática a lo largo de sus "novelas". La estructuración narrativa, por tanto, no se produce en torno a una línea argumental, sino hacia el conjunto de imágenes. Es precisamente ése el acierto narrativo... el trabajo mental que requiere para vislumbrar el desasosiego del protagonista en una ciudad poblada por seres inmorales, que carecen de todo principio ético.
Dura, muy dura (no por lo escabrosa, sino por el esfuerzo de concentración que supone).

[Héctor Méndez Gómez · Rating 2 out of 5]

La trilogía de la ocupación contiene las primeras obras de Modiano, nobel del 2014 "Por el arte de la memoria con la que ha evocado los más inasibles destinos humanos y descubierto el mundo de la ocupación". Siento que en general no era lo que yo esperaba para un nobel, posiblemente no estaba preparado para su estilo; pero le daré oportunidad en otras de sus obras más adelante.

Las tres novelas me fueron díficil de leer.

El lugar de la estrella... 😟

La ronda nocturna... 😖

Los paseos de circunvalación sí logré entenderlo un poquito, una historia algo nostálgica, que igual se me hizo pesada como las dos primeras..

Espero leer más sobre Modiano en el fúturo y lograr encontrar una lectura que me atrape de principio a fin.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The three short novels bundled as The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l'Étoile – The Night Watch – Ring Roads by Patrick Modiano show a rapid progression from an awkward early work ("La Place de l'Étoile") to the beginnings of the superior "Ring Roads," in which the author's main themes are already apparent.

Interestingly, Modiano never experienced the German occupation in France, as he was born in July 1945, two months after VE Day. So what we have are three fantasies on life among lowlifes somehow connected with the German occupiers. Completely absent from all three novelettes is any mention of the French Liberation Forces.

I loved "Ring Roads" and its sleazy characters, particularly the erotically corrupt Sylviane Quemph, with her jodhpurs, riding boots, and suggestively unbuttoned blouse. One of the corrupt characters is the narrator's father, who does not only not recognize his son but once tried to push him onto the path of an approaching Metro train.

I get the impression that all of the characters in all three stories would not have fared well after the liberation of France.

[Gregory Duke]

La Place de l'Étoile - 4/5
Hysterically ridiculous. A takedown of France's relationship with the history of the Occupation through various forms of satire. The riffs on Proust humored me. Insane how referential this is, like a bygone document with little to hold the contemporary (especially non-French) reader's attention stably. Yet its craziness kept me going and reading quite swiftly.

The Night Watch - did not finish
Awful nonsense. Trying so hard to achieve nouveau roman-like greatness in its unwillingness to help the reader in any way, but it simply pesters.

Ring Roads - did not finish
It feels like a prototype of Modiano's later work (based solely on what I know from having read Missing Person), but reading this agonized me. My brain would not retain any information Modiano offered.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Carmen · Rating 4 out of 5]

You try to forget the past, but your footsteps invariably lead you back to difficult crossroads.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very witty trilogy, about the occupation of France in the 40s, told with extreme irreverence. The first book Place de l'Etoile is told in a manic voice of young Jewish man who tries on all of the epithets that are used against Jews in France's highly anti-Semitic state. This play on characters is a mind bending
screed. Book 2 The Night Watch and Book 3 Ring Roads have different voices that look at the ambiguity of collaboration. These have a feel of Fellini films very schizophrenic and intriguing.
It helps to have some back ground in the French players, writers, artists and philosophers, but the author kindly has an appendix giving the background and political tendency of the major persona which are referenced.
The average person has a fairly good grasp of the anti-Semitic attitudes of the German and Polish populations during WWII, but few unless they are acquainted with French history understand how deeply ingrained the anti-Semitic feeling ran through the population of France.
Very creative mind fu**.

[Pedro Pablo Uceda Carrillo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Los dos primeros relatos son complejos por la estructura y por lo deslabazada que parece la historia, pero están llenos de imágenes muy impactantes, casi oníricas. Están llenos de referencias culturales y literarias francesas sus son complicadas de entender, sin tirar de Google. El tercero es más asequible pero también sorprende. A mí me ha merecido la pena la lectura, me quedo con ganas de leer más de Modiano.

[Gill Bennett · Rating 4 out of 5]

These three early short novels written by Modiano, when in his early twenties, are very different from the stylish and superficially unemotional books of his later years of which I have read several with pleasure.

The surreal and crazily fast paced La Place de l’Étoile requires a different mindset. The setting for all three is France, particularly Paris during WW2, and they highlight the virulent antisemitism prevalent at that time but clearly going back to the Dreyfus affair in 1894, which is referenced in the story. Modiano focusses on the underbelly of life in wartime Paris: the black marketeers, the prostitues, corrupt police, the abandonned mansions. The last short novel, Ring Roads, heralds a more reflective style as a son tracks down his Egyptian Jewish black marketeer father. The preoccupations with father and son relationships: who am I? and where do I come from? suffuse many of Modiano’s works.

Overall three fascinating, if disturbing, insights into wartime France which help to explain the postwar consequences of Nazi collaboration and widespread antisemitism.

[Cristina]

Abandonado. No es el momento.

[Valentina Salvatierra · Rating 2 out of 5]

Top tip: If you are reading the same edition I did, and are averse to plot spoilers (although the plot in all three of these is arguably secondary) don't read William Boyd's preface before reading the novellas. It gives more spoilers than anything I'm going to write here.

A set of novellas joined by their shared theme of the Nazi occupation of France and, especially, Paris. Highly localised in terms of setting and cultural references – which constantly made me feel I was missing something to help me get the most out of them. Rather than aspiring to some universal literariness, Modiano is obsessed with the acutely local. The fixation on certain themes of anti-Semitism, 'Jewish identity', and French literature got somewhat tedious, especially if (like me) they are not topics that one is especially interested in.

For all its obscurity, La Place de l'Étoile was the one I enjoyed the most, because of its satirical and hallucinatory tone. The segment where the narrator becomes the lover of the Marquise de Fougeire-Jusquiames was especially powerful, with its feverish switching between a third person, first person, and second person narration (e.g. p. 72) highlighting the absurdity and instability of this whole narration.

The Night Watch was slightly more conventional, despite some disconcerting shifts in narrative time telling a more or less coherent narrative of a young Jewish man and his ethical dilemma as he becomes a double agent between the French Gestapo and a Resistance cell almost without knowing it, by osmosis so to speak. The characterisation of someone who is neither hero nor villain, and yet ends up falling into the category of 'traitor', is the essential thread here and it does work, producing a convincing portrait of plausible moral dilemmas during the Occupation.

Finally, Ring Roads is certainly the most linear of the three, even if the final passage casts doubts on the factuality of all the prior events. It's the anti-climatic tale of a young man searching for his father after a 10 year separation, finding him in a rural town on the outskirts of Paris. Instead of having some heart-to-heart bonding experience or confronting him for an apparent murder attempt the last time they saw each other, the young man establishes social relations with his father's unsavoury companions for some time (days? weeks? clear timelines are not a priority here) and then very suddenly steals a car and takes his father with him back to Paris. Strange. The title alludes to some roads in the Paris periphery but it also seems to sum up the futility of this narrative that circles around memories with emotional detachment and never provides any resolution to them.

Regarding the translation: there were some wonky parts where it seemed like the translator had missed some words, e.g. 'the woman running the Clous-Foucré while the Beasuires [were away] once ran a bordello' (230). The decision to leave in some French phrases like Vive la France, comissaire, Résistants, préfet de police, etc seemed somewhat arbitrary, lending the novels an air of pretentiousness that I suspect was absent in the original. Although, to be fair, the content is often fairly pretentious as well–maybe I simply didn't enjoy this because I've never read Marcel Proust, which seemed to be a prerequisite?

All in all, not sure this introduction to Modiano through his first three works makes me very keen to read anything else of his. If his later work is a re-working and sophistication of the same themes suggested here, then count me out.

[grimaud · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es curioso que en esta llamada trilogía de la ocupación no se les vea el pelo a los ocupantes. No hay ningún personaje alemán, ni siquiera aparece un solo soldado. Quizá sería mejor llamarla Trilogía de la traición

El lugar de la estrella
No sé muy bien qué pensar de esta novela. Es muy francesa, muy culta. Hay multitud de referencias a autores y libros que solo podrá entender y disfrutar un especialista en la cultura francesa de la época. El protagonista es un ser contradictorio. Un joven intelectual pedante bastante irritante, un provocador de esos que son felices llevando la contraria. El relato se lee en una atmósfera de irrealidad que va creciendo cada vez mas, hasta que uno llega al final tan confuso como el propio protagonista.

La ronda nocturna
Esta me ha gustado mucho mas. También es compleja, de cronología desordenada pero el significado queda bien claro. Nos metemos en la cabeza de un traidor, de un delator, de un agente doble que vende a los suyos, a los que luchaban en la sombra para liberar a Francia. El retrato de los colaboracionistas, de los que se aprovechaban de la situación para medrar, es tremendo. Buena literatura.

Los paseos de circunvalación
Otra buena novela protagonizada por el mismo tipo de gente, los que se aprovechaban de la situación delicada del país ocupado. Colaboracionistas, especuladores, estafadores, fascistas y otras personas de moral muy dudosa. Y entre ellos está el padre del protagonista. Lo que me lleva a intuir (y el prólogo me lo confirma) que el propio padre de Modiano era uno de ellos y que esta trilogía es una especie de desahogo que tiene el escritor para intentar comprender y perdonar a su padre.

[David Lowther · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this a tough read. The Occupation Trilogy by the Nobel Prize winning author Patrick Modiano is, essentially, three novellas which share the theme of France under German occupation between 1940 and 1945. The author was a young man when he wrote these three stories between 1968 and 1972 and was clearly influenced by the revolutionary atmosphere of the times. He must have been one of the first to confront French guilt over collaboration and their treatment of the Jews.

None of the stories is an easy read, especially the first La Place de L'Etoile which is written in such a surreal manner that one can imagine the great film maker Luis Bunuel having a field adapting it for the screen. However difficult to follow the stories must be, the language sticks in the mind and bear in mind this is a translation so reading it in the original French must be even more fascinating.

Anyone tackling The Occupation Trilogy should read William Boyd's excellent introduction to the book.

Modiano went on to write the screenplay to Louis Malle's screen masterpiece Lacombe Lucien which is a devastating story of confused collaboration in occupied France and is more accessible than The Occupation Trilogy.

David Lowther. Author of The Blue Pencil, Liberating Belsen and Two Families at War, all published by Sacristy Press.

[Harry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three short novels set in Paris during WWII by Nobel Literature Prize-winner Patrick Modiano. Uneven, but increasingly gripping as the stories go from collaboration and war-time corruption to betrayal by a group of amoral, sleazy individuals getting by and even thriving in the streets of occupied Paris. Unsettling, moody, and absorbing.

[Pepe Llopis Manchón · Rating 3 out of 5]

Aquí pueden haber fallado dos cosas: la primera, mi análisis. Es posible que no haya podido comprender al escritor. O la segunda: el propio Modiano. El haber mantenido una perpetua inconexión entre las diferentes imágenes (a modo de escenas) sin ningún tipo de unión (no me importa si lineal o salto-temporal) ha sido a mi parecer un fallo rotundo. ¡No sé qué pensar! La descriptiva me ha gustado. El trasfondo histórico y la trama (trama a medias) también. Pero... No sé. Sin duda algo falla garrafalmente.

[Steve Eaton · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up Modiano’s book after reading a glowing review of it in the NYRB. I gave up after getting to p. 22 of La Place de l'Etoile. It is a confusing pastiche of scenes and settings a la Pynchon, but overall a fantasy of French Jews gleefully collaborating with the Nazis in their own destruction, heavily larded with cultural name-dropping of names that mean nothing to this reader. It doesn't help that this English version has a typo - a missing or misspelled word - on nearly every page. Or is that also in service of some deeper purpose that this reader is unable to fathom?

[Lisa]

Not in the mood for this.
I've read other books by Modiano and really admired them, but this 'Let's shock 'em with a spray of foul language on page one' just didn't appeal to me.
I haven't thrown it out, I may come back to it, but not ATM.
I don't rate books I haven't finished.

Update: I'm unlikely ever to read it after reading this review at The Modern Novel...
https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe...

Update: I've given it away...

[Cris · Rating 1 out of 5]

Me ha costado terminar este libro, de hecho creo que saltar repetidamente sobre una cama de pinchos hubiese sido mucho más agradable y fácil. En fin, espero que Modiano haya mejorado con el tiempo, porque sino dudo mucho que me vuelva a acercar a sus textos.

1/5 Vomitivo simplemente.

[Ken French · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly written. Fascinating short novels exposing different aspects of France during the Occupation. The first is unexpectedly funny at times. All three have interesting, conflicted central characters. I'm looking forward to reading more of Modiano's work.