Papered Over

He had told me that he shredded street posters himself to uncover the ones hidden beneath the newer strata. He pulled the strips down layer by layer and photographed them meticulously, stage by stage, down to the last scraps of paper that remained on the billboard or stone wall.

Patrick Modiano, "Afterimage"

I picked up Suspended Sentences after Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature this past fall and was immediately reminded of an Alain Resnais film—not that I'm the first to draw a connection between the two memory-obsessed artists. Modiano himself acknowledged a debt to the late filmmaker when accepting a prize from the Bibliothèque nationale for his body of work in 2011. "During my childhood, I saw Alain Resnais's documentary Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) [All the World's Memories] about the journey of a book arriving at the Bibliothèque nationale," he said, "and the film made me want to write."

description

Read my latest column on Modiano and Resnais at Three Quarks Daily
1 like ·   •  3 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on February 23, 2015 06:14 Tags: alain-resnais, patrick-modiano, raymond-queneau
Comments Showing 1-3 of 3 (3 new)    post a comment »
dateUp arrow    newest »

message 1: by John (new)

John Jr. Your 3QD column on Modiano and Resnais is a fine piece of writing, the only defect of which is that it made me want to hide myself away for a week or more and read every piece of writing, see every piece of film, that you discussed. I posted a comment there too.


message 2: by Lisa (new)

Lisa Lieberman What a compliment! But of course you must do that. (Start with Suspended Sentences. I think I know your tastes well enough to be confident that you will appreciate it as much as I did. The translation is stunning, too.)


message 3: by Lilo (new)

Lilo Hi, Lisa,

I tried to send you a little message and thank you for your friend request, but it seems that Goodreads no longer has the function to send messages to authors. Maybe you could drop me a line (as a GR message), so that I can reply.

Lilo


back to top