The first novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014 which with The Night
Watch and Ring Roads forms a trilogy of the Occupation 'A Marcel Proust of our time' Peter
Englund permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy 'Modiano is the poet of the Occupation and
a spokesman for the disappeared and I am thrilled that the Swedish Academy has recognised him'
Rupert Thomson Guardian Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic often grotesque satire of
France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory
imagination of Raphaël Schlemilovitch a young Jewish man torn between self-aggrandisement and
self-loathing who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune may have lived during the Nazi
Occupation may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious collaborators and anti-Semites of
the time may even have been the lover of Eva Braun. or he may have been none of these things.
But at the centre of this vortex is 'La Place de l'Étoile' - the Place of the Star - which is
both the geographical and moral centre of Paris and that place next the heart where French
Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star the symbol of their persecution.
