‘I will not be home tonight … black and white’: alluding to the suicide note left by Gérard de Nerval for his aunt. ‘Ne m’attends pas ce soir car la nuit sera noire et blanche.’
Say, what have you done … with your youth?: the last line of the poem ‘Le Ciel est, par-dessus le toit’ by Paul Verlaine.
the roundup on 16 July 1942: The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup was a Nazi ordered mass arrest of Parisian Jews by the French police.
Émilienne d’Alençon (1869–1946): French dancer and actress. She was famously a courtesan, and the lover of, among others, Leopold II of Belgium.
‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my truncheon’: alluding to the line ‘when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun’ often attributed to Hermann Göring. In fact, the line originally appears in Hanns Johst’s play Schlageter: ‘Whenever I hear the word Culture… I release the safety catch of my Browning!’
‘Du bist der Lenz nachdem ich verlangte’: ‘You are the spring for which I longed’ — Sieglinda’s aria from Richard Wagner’s opera Die Walküre.
Radio Londres: a BBC broadcast in French to occupied France during the Second World War.
Moi, j’aime le music-hall … danseuses légères: ‘Moi j’aime le music hall’ by Charles Trenet.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Patrick Modiano was born in Paris in 1945 in the immediate aftermath of World War Two and the Nazi occupation of France, a dark period which continues to haunt him. After passing his baccalauréat, he left fulltime education and dedicated himself to writing, encouraged by the French writer Raymond Queneau. From his very first book to his most recent, Modiano has pursued a quest for identity and some form of reconciliation with the past. His books have been published in forty languages and among the many prizes they have won are the Grand Prix du Roman de l’Académie française (1972), the Prix Goncourt (1978) and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2012). In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATOR
Frank Wynne has won three major prizes for his translations from the French, including the 2002 IMPAC for Atomised by Michel Houellebecq and the 2005 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for Windows on the World by Frederic Beigbeder. He is also the translator from the Spanish of Tomás Eloy Martínez’s Purgatory, Miguel Figueras’s Kamchatka and Carlos Acosta’s Pig’s Foot. In 2014 he was awarded the Valle Inclán Prize for his translation of Alonso Cueto’s The Blue Hour.