STOCKHOLM (AP) — Patrick Modiano of France, who has made a lifelong study of the Nazi occupation and its effect on his country, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature last Thursday.

The Swedish Academy gave the 8 million kronor ($1.1 million) prize to Modiano “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation”.

Modiano, 69, whose novel Missing Person won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1978 — was born in a west Paris suburb two months after World War II ended in Europe in July 1945. His father was of Jewish Italian origins and met his Belgian actress mother during the occupation of Paris.

Jewishness, the Nazi occupation and loss of identity are recurrent themes in his novels, which include 1968’s La Place de l’Etoile — later hailed in Germany as a key post-Holocaust work.

Modiano owes his first big break to a friend of his mother’s, French writer Raymond Queneau, who first introduced him to the Gallimard publishing house when he was in his early twenties.

He has published more than 40 works in French, some of which have been translated into English, including Ring of Roads: A Novel, Villa Triste, A Trace of Malice, and Honeymoon.

He has also written children’s books and film scripts and made the 1974 feature movie Lacombe, Lucien with director Louis Malle. He was a member of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 2000.

Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy said time, memory and identity are recurring themes in Modiano’s works.

“His books speak to each other; they are echoes of each other,” Englund told Swedish broadcaster SVT. “That makes his work in a way unique. You could say that he is sort of a Marcel Proust of our time.”

Modiano, who lives in Paris, rarely accords interviews. In 2012, he won the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

Last year’s prize went to Canadian writer Alice Munro for her mastery of the short story.

This year’s Nobel Prize announcements started last Monday with a US-British scientist splitting the medicine prize with a Norwegian husband-and-wife team for brain research that could pave the way for a better understanding of diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Two Japanese researchers and a Japanese-born American won the physics prize for the invention of blue light-emitting diodes, a breakthrough that spurred the development of LED as a new light source.

The chemistry prize on Wednesday went to two Americans and a German researcher who found new ways to give microscopes sharper vision, letting scientists peer into living cells with unprecedented detail to seek the roots of disease.

The awards will be presented on December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

OCM Bocas Prize winners in the Alps

Robert Antoni, 2014 winner of the OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature; 2012 winner, Earl Lovelace; and Kei Miller, 2014 non-fiction winner, were among a group of eight writers invited to showcase Caribbean writing in the Swiss alpine town of Bellinzona recently.

The annual Babel Festival of Literature and Translation put the spotlight on French, Spanish and English writing from the Caribbean and featured some of the best contemporary novelists, including Patrick Chamoiseau of Martinique whose novel Texaco won him France’s most prestigious prize, the Prix Goncourt.

Trinidadian Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, whose debut novel Mrs B was launched at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest in April, was also among the four English-speaking writers who delighted the mainly Swiss audience.

The Babel Festival and the NGC Bocas Lit Fest are collaborators in bringing Caribbean literature to a wider international readership. Translation, language and culture will be one of the themes of the 2015 NGC Bocas Lit Fest.

>>>AFTERWORD

8th Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture on for this Thursday 

Professor of West Indian and Caribbean Literature at The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Evelyn O’Callaghan, will deliver the 8th Annual Edward Baugh Distinguished Lecture this Thursday, October 16, 2014 in Lecture Theatre 1 (Faculty of Medical Sciences) at The University of the West Indies, Mona, at 6:00 pm. Her lecture is titled “Contesting Visual Meaning: West Indian Landscapes Real and Imagined.” The event is hosted by the Department of Literatures in English, UWI, Mona Campus.

Born in Nigeria of Irish parentage, raised in Jamaica, and a student of Professor Edward Baugh who supervised her doctoral thesis, Professor O’Callaghan is an accomplished educator and researcher whose lecture promises to be thought-provoking. Her diverse research interests include women’s narratives, feminist and postcolonial literary theory, constructions of sexuality in contemporary women’s prose fiction, West Indian “diaspora” literature, narratives of indentured servitude, and creole language continuum in Caribbean literature and culture. She is currently researching visual composition and art history related to 18th- and 19th-century representations of West Indian landscape.

Professor O’Callaghan is the author of two books: Woman Version: Theoretical Approaches to West Indian Fiction by Women (1993) and Women Writing the West Indies, 1804-1939: “A Hot Place, Belonging to Us” (2004). Woman Version is a groundbreaking intervention in Caribbean feminist literary studies, as she uses the Jamaican popular musical form of dub to conceptualise Caribbean women’s writing as a kind of dub version of preceding male-authored Caribbean texts and Western literary tradition, a remixing and recontextualising local and global forms and themes from the perspective of gender and sexuality. Women Writing the West Indies is a significant rethinking of West Indian literary history, which highlights the neglected presence of white West Indian women writers. Her scholarly work is marked by meticulous scholarship, a keen awareness of historical and cultural contexts, and an enviable ability to lucidly discuss sophisticated theoretical concepts. She has also contributed articles and chapters to anthologies, readers, encyclopaedias, and journals, and reviewed several books on gender and Caribbean literature.

At the UWI Cave Hill Campus Professor O’Callaghan has served as Head of the Department of Literatures in English (1995-1996), Chair of the Creative Arts Centre Consultative Committee (1998-2006), Head of the Department of Language, Linguistics and Literature (2005-2008), and Deputy Dean (1990-2000) in the Faculty of Humanities and Education. Between 2010 and 2013, she was Vice-Chair of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS). She has also served on academic boards and committees, and has been an invited lecturer and keynote speaker at universities and institutions across the globe. She has received numerous awards and scholarships, including the prestigious Rhodes scholarship (Oxford University, 1977), the Lucyle Hook Fellowship (Barnard College, 2001), and the British Academy/ACU Grant for International Collaboration (University of Reading, 2010-2011).

The public is invited to attend.

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>>>BOOK NEWS

Emory University acquires archives of short story master Flannery O’Connor 

ATLANTA – Emory University officials say the school has acquired the archives of American author Flannery O’Connor.

They said in a news release that Emory’s Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library acquired the archives of the novelist and short story author from the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust in Milledgeville, Georgia.

Among other honours, O’Connor posthumously won the 1972 National Book Award in the fiction category for The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor, who was born in Savannah and lived in Milledgeville, died of lupus at age 39 in 1964.

Officials said the collection also includes more than 600 letters between O’Connor and her mother.

Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Tretheway, who directs Emory’s creative writing programme, said O’Connor’s work influenced her own growth as a writer.

Books:

>>>WAYS WITH WORDS

Five books to fall in love with this fall…

Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans, WW Norton & Company

In her bleak and occasionally comic debut short-story, Molly Antopol, who was selected as one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” writers in 2013, writes about a diverse cast of characters, including a former dissident from Communist-era Prague who worries that his daughter’s new play will paint a negative portrait of him, and a young Israeli journalist who dates a widower still grieving for his wife.

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See, Scribner

Doerr’s novel unfolds during World War II in France. A blind girl and her father flee Nazi-occupied Paris and move to a seaside town, taking with them a precious jewel from a natural history museum. The father is arrested by the Germans, and a Nazi treasure hunter tries to track down the jewel.

Phil Klay, Redeployment, The Penguin Press

Klay, a former Marine who fought in Iraq, captures the terror, boredom and occasional humour of war in his debut collection of short stories, some set in the Anbar Province of Iraq, and others in America as soldiers struggle to readjust to civilian life after being in combat.

Elizabeth McCracken, Thunderstruck & Other Stories, The Dial Press

McCraken, whose novel The Giant’s House was a National Book Award finalist, has published her first collection of stories in 20 years. Among the nine stories are a tale about a successful documentary filmmaker who has to face a famous subject he manipulated and betrayed; one about a young scholar who is mourning his wife; and another about a grocery store manager who obsesses about a woman’s disappearance.

Marilynne Robinson, Lila, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Lila – the final book in Robinson’s trilogy of novels set in the fictional town of Gilead, Iowa – centres on Lila, the troubled young woman who marries the elderly Reverend Ames, the conflicted Calvinist minister and narrator of Gilead.

>>> 60-SECOND REVIEW

The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman, Putnam, 560 pages

The Golem of Hollywood – the first collaboration by father-and-son Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman – tries to showcase the best that each author brings to his individual novels, but, ultimately, is overwritten. A shorter, more focused story would have been stronger.

The novel works best when Jonathan Kellerman’s affinity for police procedures and Jesse Kellerman’s use of unusual psychological suspense mesh organically in a hunt for a murderer linked to a Jewish legend.

But too often the plot relies on unbelievable twists and tiresome flashbacks about the golem, an artificial human being in Hebrew folklore that can be endowed with life. Frequent touches of the supernatural further weigh down the novel.

Detective Jacob Lev is reassigned to the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Projects division. His first assignment is an odd murder: a severed head has been found in a vacant house in the Hollywood Hills. The only clue is the Hebrew word for justice burned into a kitchen counter. The head is that of a serial killer, last seen a year ago in Prague before he was attacked by a “hard-domed insect”.

The investigation is stymied because he can’t get access to information he needs and his new bosses discourage him from talking to witnesses or following clues. Jacob is also confused and frustrated by his own encounters with a strange beetle. The case solidifies only when Jacob travels to Prague, where legend maintains that a rabbi created the golem to protect his synagogue.

While the police procedural aspect moves at a fast clip, the investigation is never as exciting as those that Alex Delaware encounters in Jonathan Kellerman’s best-selling series nor as interesting as the unusual turn of events in Jesse Kellerman’s stand-alone novels. Jewish lore, supernatural events and shady cops are just window dressing to disguise that there is little beyond the curtain.

-Associated Press

>>> WHAT WE’RE READING NOW

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn 

Debuting in 2012, the novel made it to the Bookends Must-Read Summer booklist then because of the buzz it had been garnering, but we’re only just reading it now in an attempt to get it done before watching the film, which was just recently released to much critical acclaim and stars Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike as the hapless couple.

This New York Times bestseller is a compulsively juicy read about a marriage gone horribly wrong. A literary suspense, the tale begins with Amy Dunne disappearing from her Missouri home on her fifth anniversary, and her husband, Nick, finding himself having to answer questions from reporters and police officers. And while it soon becomes clear that the Dunnes weren’t the perfect couple their friends and neighbours had assumed, the circumstances of Amy’s disappearance keep getting cloudier. The story is compelling because of Flynn’s dark humour which works despite the grave domestic state of affairs, but most of all, Flynn’s inventive narrative technique in duelling chapters: a he said-she said, if you will, that employs part-unreliable narrator in present time (Nick) and part-diary entries as flashbacks (Amy) that reveal how differently both parties viewed their marriage, leaving the reader wondering who is telling the truth.

Flynn, 41, grew up in Kansas City, Mo, the daughter of two community college professors. Her 2006 debut was the mystery Sharp Objects and her follow-up was 2009’s Dark Places. She said she wrote her first two books on evenings and weekends while working as a journalist.

Flynn thinks the appeal of the novel comes from giving readers a sneak-peek into someone else’s marriage: the tugs of war, power plays and gender roles. Flynn also was ready to write a mystery from inside a relationship after two novels that she describes as exploring “loneliness and isolation”.

“I wanted to kind of play with the opposite of that, which is what happens when you choose to combine lives with someone. The good things that are possible and the bad things that are possible,” Flynn said in an interview when the book was released.

IF YOU LIKE GONE GIRL, YOU MAY ALSO LIKE:

Silent Wife by ASA Harrison – Also known as the “Gone Girl of 2013”. Jodi and Todd are at a bad place in their marriage. Much is at stake, including the affluent life they lead in their beautiful waterfront condo in Chicago, as she, the killer, and he, the victim, rush haplessly toward the main event. He is a committed cheater. She lives and breathes denial. He exists in dual worlds. She likes to settle scores. He decides to play for keeps. She has nothing left to lose. Told in alternating voices, The Silent Wife is about a marriage in the throes of dissolution, a couple headed for catastrophe, concessions that can’t be made, and promises that won’t be kept.

You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz – Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself, devoted to her husband, a paediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son, Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice. Grace is also the author of the forthcoming You Should Have Known, a book in which she castigates women for not valuing their intuition and calls upon them to pay attention to their first impressions of men.

But weeks before the book is published, there is a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only a chain of terrible revelations.

Bookends serial:

The Pleasure Spot

CHAPTER SEVEN

Being newly divorced was a status Margaret Simpson was only just getting used to. And, truthfully, she wasn’t even sure she was in fact getting used to it. The situation was weird. Like wearing underwear back to front. In many ways she felt as though she was still married. That was, she supposed, because she’d been married for so long, and the fact that she’d always seen herself that way. A wife. Robert’s wife. Whenever identity issues plagued her, at least there was always that fail-safe. Now she had to reprogramme her thinking. When you were married, you took a lot of things for granted, as she’d naively done. Like, getting older. There was no panic, as far as she could remember, about illness and all the rest of the concerns that came with aging and, eventually, old age and the final humiliation, decrepitude. When you were married you were married forever and your husband, you assumed, would be there at the bitter end, for better or worse, to take care of you if your health failed. And vice versa. But being single again, truthfully, was horrifying. Sure, in a sense she felt liberated. She’d shaken off a marriage that never should have happened in the first place. But, for all her talk of liberation, secretly she’d never felt so lost. The truth was that, when she crawled into bed at the end of the day, she was alone. There was no man there, even for just the sense of another body next to hers, giving warmth and comfort and most importantly, security. She remembered how she loved to go to sleep beside Robert most when there was a night storm, how she’d loved when he held her close when she shivered in fear because of the lightning, which had always rendered her practically catatonic ever since she was a little girl, and how blissful and at peace she would feel in the morning still wrapped in is arms. When she got into bed now, even if it wasn’t raining out, the loneliness was almost excruciating. But wasn’t this what she’d wanted, even before she’d begun to contemplate life without her husband?

How she’d envied Maxine’s no-strings-attached outlook. Over the last some years Maxine had showed up to their family functions with a varied coterie of men; none lingered for a protracted period in her bed and Margaret had almost been envious. At Lucia’s 13th birthday party Maxine had turned up with a guy obviously younger than her. He was thin and wiry but in a good, sexy way; he had that look that let you know he offered a buffet of delight in the bedroom. Just the week before Maxine had turned up to one of Evan’s little league football matches she’d invited her to holding hands with another man, this one older, more buff and filled with the swagger of a pro athlete. Later, after the match, Maxine, while helping Margaret to share the boys’ meals of fried chicken and potato salad, had whispered cheekily to her sister, while waggling her fingers flirtily to the man who sat watching her with naked lust, “Oh, Mags. This one makes me walk funny in the mornings.”

Margaret forced a smile but she’d been caught up trying to recall how long it had been since Robert had made her walk funny. If in fact he ever had.

So, one week later, at Lucia’s party, Margaret could not help feeling her own throat tighten with an emotion she was not ready to identify when she watched her sister and her new boyfriend sitting by the pool, Maxine in his lap feeding him ice-cream, on the outskirts of the party. It was clear they were in their own little world and that he, too, at least had the capacity to make her sister walk funny in the morning.

At any rate, now that she was single and sleeping by herself, Margaret had nothing but time and opportunity to contemplate her life, her future. It didn’t look promising at all. She was alone, and would probably be until she died. Who would want a woman her age, divorced and with two children?

And it wasn’t just her depressing state of manlessness that worried her. She was a mother, but she’d never felt less like a mother and more like a child herself in all her life. She noticed that she’d begun to second-guess herself when she had to make day-to-day decisions about her kids that did not necessarily require input from her husband. Like the other day when Evan had asked to spend the weekend at a sleepover with his friend Shaq. Margaret had dithered, unsure of what to tell him. Sure, she knew Shaq and his parents, but did she want to shoulder that responsibility for a decision she’d made, if things went awry on the sleepover? When they were married, Robert had been the one who made those decisions. And there was her relationship with Lucia, in particular, which was a great stressor. She never knew where she stood with the girl, who blew hot and cold about how she felt about her parents – Margaret, especially.

And then, as Margaret lay tossing and turning restlessly in bed at night, her stomach in anxious knots, she would think about her relationship with God. Or rather, her lack of one. She hadn’t been to church in a long time. Maybe – what was it, twice? – in two years. How had she, who’d previously read her Bible religiously, now fallen so far away from what she’d been before? It was because of this estrangement with God, she’d convinced herself, that her relationship with her daughter had become so tense. It was like living with a moody pet. Oh, Lucia had other reasons for being mad at her, and she was justified, but it was Margaret’s inability to connect spirituality that Lucia sensed, which made her respond with sarcasm and outright rudeness. It was frustrating.

But more than everything else, what concerned Margaret was the noticeable and growing distance between her and Maxine. The 10-year difference in ages had never before been a problem in how they related to one another, even when they’d been younger and still living in Jamaica. Maxine hadn’t been like some older siblings who found their baby sisters a nuisance. Margaret had a distinct memory of being five years old and hanging out with Maxine and her friends as they trolled the malls uptown at Christmastime looking for inexpensive gifts. How proud she’d been to be in the presence of the big girls who entrusted her with their secrets about the boys they’d had crushes on! And then, a year later, the family had moved to the Bahamas, and nothing changed. When Maxine moved away from home she would invite her 11-year-old sister to her little apartment on Bird Road in Freeport. And it was Maxine who’d taken her in and raised her when their parents had died in an automobile accident when Margaret had barely turned a teenager. They’d lived together in that house in the Bahamas, clinging to each other because they were all either one had left in the world. Ten years apart, but thick as thieves. And so it was to her big sister that Margaret had run when she’d found out she was 20, directionless and pregnant…

TO BE CONTINUED…