Ring Roads
3.5/5
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About this ebook
Ring Roads is a brilliant, almost hallucinatory evocation of the uneasy, corrupt years of the Occupation and like The Night Watch is both cruel and tender--savage in its depiction of the anti-Semitic newspaper editor, the bullying ex-Foreign Legionnaire and the former prostitute, who treat Chalva with ever more threatening contempt; tender in its attempt to understand and identify with the Jew who cannot see the danger he courts.
Patrick Modiano
PATRICK MODIANO was born in 1945 in a suburb of Paris and grew up in various locations throughout France. In 1967, he published his first novel, La Place de l'étoile, to great acclaim. Since then, he has published over twenty novels—including the Goncourt Prize−winning Rue des boutiques obscures (translated as Missing Person), Dora Bruder, and Les Boulevards des ceintures (translated as Ring Roads)—as well as the memoir Un Pedigree and a children's book, Catherine Certitude. He collaborated with Louis Malle on the screenplay for the film Lacombe Lucien. In 2014, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy cited “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation,” calling him “a Marcel Proust of our time.”
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Reviews for Ring Roads
37 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5These Modiano books are highly weird. The premises, the situations, the people, the interactions. Can't wait for the next one!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5If one of the more annoying subgenres of LitFic is “Middle-aged introvert contemplates adultery”, then this book can be described as “Middle-aged introvert contemplates their daddy issues” -- another subgenre I have very little patience with. That is the reason that this relatively short novel just didn't work for me. Other aspects of the book are decent to good -- the writing, the structure, the atmosphere, the gradual build-up to a reveal that makes you re-evaluate the entire story. All of that works: the portions of the book that deal with world-building and setting are excellent. I just don’t think it gelled well with the the main story, which, indeed, deals with a thirty-ish male introvert whining about their daddy issues: the bloated self-importance of those parts enervated me instead of engaging my interest. So the main character grew up without his daddy, briefly ran a semi-successful antiques con together after high school, and then he just up and left his daddy. At the time of the main events, that was ten years ago, and now he’s tracked daddy down again, only for some unexplained reason daddy doesn't recognize him. And so we get to watch as the main character strikes up an awkward, spiteful acquaintance with his estranged father and his circle of unpleasant friends. This one was not for me. Too much self-pity, too much whining, too much artificial mysteries generated by withholding information -- I just couldn't care. Modiano is good at invoking atmosphere, and there’s a late-ish reveal about the background that kinda sorta explains some of the mysteries, but, in my opinion, that was not enough to offset my annoyance. Better luck next time.