Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Patrick Modiano accepts Nobel prize, confident of literature’s future

In his acceptance speech, novelist says he is convinced the writers of the future ‘will safeguard the succession’

Patrick Modiano
'Time has speeded up' … 2014 Nobel prize winner for literature Patrick Modiano delivers his Nobel lecture at the Swedish academy in Stockholm on 7 December. Photograph: Tt News Agency/Reuters
Patrick Modiano, who won the Nobel prize for literature this autumn, has stated his conviction that tomorrow’s novelists “will safeguard the succession [of literature] just as every generation has done since Homer”.

Speaking as he accepted the 8m kroner (£710,000) award, the French novelist appeared at odds with writers such as Will Self and Tim Parks who earlier this year predicted the end of the literary novel, Parks blaming the “state of constant distraction we live in”.

Modiano, whose prize was awarded for his evocations of the past, for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the [Nazi] occupation”, did say in his Nobel lecture that “unfortunately I do not think that the remembrance of things past can be done any longer with Marcel Proust’s power and candidness”.
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