Suspended Sentences

Patrick Modiano's Suspended Sentences is a collection of three semi-autobiographical novellas originally published between 1988 and 1993. The stories are narrated by Patoche (a stand-in for Modiano himself) who recalls with Proust-like attention to detail the post-war occupation of Paris that took place when he was a child. Modiano would later be awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”