Night watch

How to become a traitor and how not to? This is the question the hero of the story asks himself, working simultaneously for the French Gestapo and the resistance network. This dilemma leads him to martyrdom, the only possible escape. La Ronde de Nuit (The Night Watch), along with the novels La Place de l'Étoile and Les Boulevards de Ceinture, form the so-called Occupation Trilogy – three novels set in Paris during the occupation from 1940–1944. Of these, La Ronde de Nuit most acutely reveals the dark sides of society and individuals. The loneliness and rootlessness of an individual exposed, on the one hand, to the unbridled rampage of collaborators, profiteers, and the French Gestapo, and on the other, to the empty gestures and alibiism of the underground French officer corps, which considered itself the sole legitimate representative of the resistance – provided that someone else did the real “dirty work” for them. The narrator becomes a double agent to protect two defenceless beings. The reader never learns his true identity: they only know his two code names – depending on which side is currently speaking of him. With this surprisingly tender yet cruel prose, Patrick Modiano held up a true, albeit unflattering, mirror to France. He thereby performed a kind of exorcism of the nation from a troubled period he did not experience himself, but whose last tremors he sensitively perceived at the time of writing, and which are still present today. Patrick Modiano (*1945), laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born in the Parisian suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt to a Jewish businessman and a Flemish actress. Young Patrick was raised by his maternal grandparents. He only learned French at school. After the death of his younger brother Rudy in 1957, his parents divorced. He grew up with foster parents in various parts of France and graduated from high school in Annecy, Savoy. He enrolled in university to avoid conscription. He did not finish his studies. He had a problematic relationship with his father. They never met again after he came of age. His literary ambitions were encouraged by his mother's friends. Raymond Queneau introduced him to literary circles. In 1968, he published the novel La Place de l'Étoile, in which he was the first to address the theme of the collaboration of French authorities with the Nazis in the extermination of the Jewish population. Patrick Modiano is the recipient of the Grand Prix of the French Academy, the Goncourt Prize, the Austrian State Prize, and others. The justification for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014 mentions his “...extraordinary art of evoking memories of even the most elusive human destinies... (and)... a deep dive into the lives of Parisians during the Nazi occupation.” He lives and works in Paris, where most of his works are set. He is spoken of as the Marcel Proust of our time.