Patrick Modiano: Little Jewel

I was in a big glass cage. I looked around. There were aquariums in other glass cages. The pharmacist must have brought me here. We had arranged to meet at six o’clock in the evening to leave for Bar-sur-Aube. Inside the aquariums, I thought I could see shadows moving: fish, perhaps. I heard the noise of waterfalls, getting louder and louder. I had been trapped in icefields a long time ago, and now there was the gushing sound of them melting. I wondered what the shadows in the aquariums could possibly be. They told me later that there had been no more room, so they put me in the ward for premature babies. For a long time to come, I heard the noise of waterfalls, a sign that for me, too, from that day on, life was beginning.

PATRICK MODIANO, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in 1945, and was educated in Annecy and Paris. He published his first novel, La Place de l’Etoile , in 1968. In 1978, he was awarded the Prix Goncourt for Rue des Boutiques Obscures (published in English as Missing Person ), and in 1996 he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres for his body of work. Mr. Modiano’s other writings include a book-length interview with the writer Emmanuel Berl and, with Louis Malle, the screenplay for Lacombe Lucien .

PENNY HUESTON is an editor and translator.