PATRICK MODIANO

(Born July 30, 1945, Boulogne-Billancourt, France),

Jean Patrick Modiano
● French writer
● His works ---reflects (40 books )used
his fascination with the human
experience of World War II to examine
individual and collective identities,
responsibilities, loyalties, memory, and
loss
● Because of his obsession with the past,
Modiano was sometimes compared to
Marcel Proust, though their styles and
concerns were quite different.
● Modiano became a noted writer of what
the French call autofiction, the blend of
autobiography and historical fiction.
● His writing style was described by one
critic as “so spare and elliptical that the
words seem only lightly attached to the
page.”
● Throughout his body of work, the
reader can readily sense the author’s
perception of the unknowability of
other people and the ambiguity of
events
● It is dark writing with a light touch.
Rue des Boutiques Obscures( 'the Street of dark shops')

● Missing Person is the sixth novel by French writer

Patrick Modiano, published on 5 September 1978. In the
same year it was awarded the Prix Goncourt.
● The English translation by Daniel Weissbort was
published in 1980.
The skill and care with which Modiano
writes about memory is evident in Missing
Person, a novel which follows an
amnesiac detective trying to find out about
his past life.

Guy Roland -jimmy pedro stern,a greek

● Rue des Boutiques Obscures is the name of a street in jew,Salonica-pedro McEvoy
Rome (La Via delle Botteghe Oscure) where one of the
characters lived,and where Modiano himself lived for Hutte-
some time.
This short classic, told in the first person by the
protagonist Guy, begins in the office of a small
detective agency.

Its owner, Hutte, a close friend of Guy’s, is

shutting it down and retiring to Nice, leaving Guy
alone in Paris.

our protagonist came to Hutte’s agency some

eight years ago for help with discovering his
identity, before joining him to work as his partner.

Having lived under the fake identity of Guy

Roland for all that time, his partner’s retirement
prompts him to begin a full-time search for his real
identity.
This leads to a fast-paced novel from the
outset, as Guy follows various leads about
his past that takes him across Paris, as he
meets people from diverse parts of the
world and walks of life, with varying
degrees of success.
The book slows down as he begins to
solve the seemingly endless clues of the
mystery surrounding his identity, and the
novel morphs from a detective novel to
one of reflection and contemplation, as
Guy realises that the key to discovering
his past life hinges on the Occupation.
Patrick Modiano’s Missing Person focuses on a
private detective, introduced as Guy Roland, who
investigates himself.
The location is Paris; the time period, the mid-1960s.
“introduced as Guy Roland,” we comprehend that we
are dealing with a detective narrator with little sense of
his own identity.
“I am nothing,” is how the book starts. “Nothing but a
pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the café
terrace, waiting for the rain to stop…”
The head of the Agency he works for, a man named
Hutte, is retiring.
The Agency is closing.
But Hutte is keeping the lease on the apartment where
the Agency operates, which means that all the “street-
and-trade directories and year books of all kinds going
back fifty years” will remain there.
Hutte, who brought Roland into the Agency eight years
ago, who taught him how to be a private investigator,
has described these volumes as “the essential tools of the
trade”, objects he’d never discard.
Roland asks about them, and when Hutte asks Roland
what he intends to do with himself, Roland says that he’s
following something up.

He tells Hutte what he’s really talking about: “My past.”

Hutte understands – “I always thought that one day
you’d try to find your past again.” – and gives him a key
for free use of the premises while he is of to retire in
Nice.

Though Hutte asks him whether finding his past will be

worth it, he does nothing to dissuade Roland from
beginning his stated quest; he, too, it seems, suffers
from a strange amnesia.
The Occupation of France is firmly Raised with Flemish as his mother tongue
embedded in a lot of Modiano’s work by his maternal grandparents due to the
since his father (of Jewish Italian origin) absence of his father, and his mother’s job
and his Belgian mother met in Paris as an actor.
during World War Two.
His brother Rudy died at the age of nine
Modiano was born two months after its
conclusion and went on to have a difficult
upbringing..
He spoke candidly of his difficult It is frankness like this that enables him to
childhood in his 2005 autobiography Un write work that tackles complex tragic
Pedigree, saying that until his twenty-first issues such as the Holocaust with
birthday everything was going on in front simultaneous lucidity and emotion.
of him and he wasn’t yet able to live his
life, describing his memoir as ‘a book less
on what I did than on what others, mainly
my parents, did to me’.
MISSING PERSON
The missing person in the title of Patrick Even his name and nationality are a
Modiano's novel, winner of the Goncourt
Prize for 1978, is the detective himself. mystery to him.

Guy Roland suffers from amnesia, the Now after a career of solving other people's
period of his life before launching his career problems, he turns to his own.
as a private investigator is almost a
complete blank.
The moment of crisis for Roland,when his Now, as he tries to pick up the pieces, he
past fell away, was—perhaps not follows an enticing series of clues, each one
surprisingly—during the period of Nazi leading him to another informant, another
occupation of France. piece of the puzzle.

In an era when many did things they would

like to forget, our hero somehow literally
wiped his memory clean, a gesture rich with
symbolic resonance.
The clues
The pieces do not seem to fit together. At
one point, Roland is convinced that he
was closely involved with Russian émigrés
in his now forgotten past life.
The other clues indicate that he was in
Hollywood, serving as confidant to actor John
Or that his last name was really McEvoy,and
he left France before the outbreak of the
war.
Or he was a Greek named Stern, a broker
who resided in Rome and Paris.
Or maybe some combination of these
enigmatic identities, these obscure destinies.

Gilbert. Another source suggests that he was a

part of the diplomatic corps for a Latin American

nation.
Where other detectives gather clues, Roland
collects
mementos. Almost everyone he interrogates has a
story to share—but not necessarily the one our
investigator has come to hear. These various
parties give him relics from their own personal
tragedies: old photos, letters, a magazine, a book.
Soon he is overloaded with keepsakes, invariably
stored in some second-hand container.
From these disparate sources Roland gradually
pieces together bits and pieces of his own
narrative. These are supplemented by flashes of
recovered memory, but the reader is never quite
sure whether the recollections are authentic or
merely the result of an overheated imagination.
Roland is too ready to agree, to play the role others
assign him. He has lost more than his memory, it
seems, and at times appears to have lost his sense
of self as well.

Certainly Modiano doesn't hesitate in
shaking up the conventions of the mystery
genre.
And as our detective gets closer and closer
to the story of his life, he seems to find
himself as the victim of a crime, the
wounded survivor of a now forgotten
conspiracy.
A strange mystery, where the same
character figures as victim, client, detective
and key witness!
Modiano amplifies the inward focus of his
narrative by presenting his protagonist as
without wife or children, or apparently even
close friends.
 Even his long-time boss and colleague in
the private eye from where he works has
moved away, leaving Roland alone in his
quest to solve this very personal mystery.
In such a solipsistic story, any investigation
is bound to collapse into endless self-
questioning and internal probing.
The story ends by leaving almost everything
behind, thousands of miles away from its
starting point, and with still more journeys
ahead of our hero.
Those who like the mystery genre for its
neat resolutions and the comforting sense of
closure from a crime solved, justice up-
held, and a perpetrator punished, will only
get a queasy sensation from Missing
Person.
In this quest for identity, the very notion of
self begins to fade under close scrutiny. "Do
not our lives dissolve into the evening?" our
narrator concludes, as he accepts the
possibility that the person he is seeking will
never be found, his identity as ephemeral as

"the sand holds the traces of our footsteps

but a few moments.
Existentialism:
According to existentialism: (1) Existence is always particular and individual—always my existence, your existence, his
existence, her existence.

(2) Existence is primarily the problem of existence (i.e., of its mode of being); it is, therefore, also the investigation of the
meaning of Being.
Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophical theory that people are free

agents who have control over their choices and actions.
Existentialists believe that society should not restrict an
individual's life or actions and that these restrictions inhibit free will
and the development of that person's potential.
Existentialism

The basic principle of existentialism is that existence precedes essence for human
beings. Essence precedes existence for objects. Objects always have a definite
purpose and this purpose is known prior to the creation of the object. On the other
hand, humans are not born with a definite purpose.