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Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas Audiobook
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Publisher Description
In this essential trilogy of novellas by the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature, French author Patrick Modiano reaches back in time, opening the corridors of memory and exploring the mysteries to be encountered there. Each novella in the volume—Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin—represents a sterling example of the author's originality and appeal, while Mark Polizzotti's superb English-language translations capture not only Modiano's distinctive narrative voice but also the matchless grace and spare beauty of his prose.
Although originally published separately, Modiano's three novellas form a single, compelling whole, haunted by the same gauzy sense of place and characters. Modiano draws on his own experiences, blended with the real or invented stories of others, to present a dreamlike autobiography that is also the biography of a place. Orphaned children, mysterious parents, forgotten friends, enigmatic strangers—all appear in this three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists.
Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano's fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person's confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano's trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
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“Completely,insouciantly, Modiano describes the interiors and essential matter of theFrench literary imagination. In these fictions, the sworn bewilderment ofintimacy as cause and quest and actual topography of narrative becomes aninexhaustible source. And from that source there flows a riverine voice oflegends and documentary legerdemain: always candid, always fitly perplexed. Inthe three novellas gathered as Suspended Sentences, this voiceelapses across Paris as it never was yet somehow must havebeen. Otherwise, there could be no accounting for acrobats, for Edith Piaf, forcollaboration and liberation and the spring of 1968. All of these and moreModiano addresses with a luminous bewilderment more intimately exacting andmore precise than any certainty could be.”
— Donald Revell, author of Pennyweight Windows
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“Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti…As good a place as any to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano’s fiction.”
— New York Times Book Review -
“Modiano’s work is unknown to most North American readers, and this is as good an introduction as any. The stories here highlight his concerns as a chronicler of the Occupation years and the lean times leading up to 1968…Fictions with a moral bite, depicting a world in which everyone, it seems, is complicit in crimes not yet specified. Moody, elegant, and dour.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review) -
“These three atmospheric novellas demonstrate the range of reading pleasure afforded by Modiano’s approach and the dark romance of his Paris…Each first-person novella is also a portrait of the artist.”
— Publishers Weekly -
“Modiano’s style, plain but elliptical and carefully wrought…Unforgettable.”
— Booklist -
“This collection of three novellas is pure Modiano, with haunting evocations of a Paris long past. It’s a hazy blend of fiction and his own experiences as a child born at the end of the war…His sparse, beautiful prose distills a feeling and mood that remains with me.”
— Cara Black, author of Murder on the Left Bank -
“Haunting. Like a master perfumer, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano has crafted a signature scent: his unmistakable blend of nostalgia, grief, love, disquiet, Paris.”
— Damion Searls, author of The Inkblots -
“Reading Modiano is like experiencing a very specific flavor you don’t encounter every day—saffron or asafetida, say. He’s direct and precise but also gently melancholy, like the squeezed essence of passing time. Mark Polizzotti’s translation expertly catches the timbre of his voice.”
— Luc Sante, award-winning writer and critic
Awards
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A New York Times Editor’s Choice
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A Huffington Post Best Book of 2014
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About Patrick Modiano
Patrick Modiano is a bestselling novelist and the winner of some of the most prestigious literary awards in France, including the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Mondial Cino Del Duca for lifetime achievement. In 2014 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for “the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.”
About the Narrators
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Sean Runnette, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, has also directed and produced more than two hundred audiobooks, including several Audie Award winners. He is a member of the American Repertory Theater company and has toured the United States and internationally with ART and Mabou Mines. His television and film appearances include Two If by Sea, Cop Land, Sex and the City, Law & Order, the award-winning film Easter, and numerous commercials.
Arthur Morey has won three AudioFile Magazine “Best Of” Awards, and his work has garnered numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and placed him as a finalist for two Audie Awards. He has acted in a number of productions, both off Broadway in New York and off Loop in Chicago. He graduated from Harvard and did graduate work at the University of Chicago. He has won awards for his fiction and drama, worked as an editor with several book publishers, and taught literature and writing at Northwestern University. His plays and songs have been produced in New York, Chicago, and Milan, where he has also performed.