La place de l'étoile
By: Patrick Modiano ; translated from the French by Frank Wynne
Contributors: Wynne, Frank, translator
Publisher: Bloomsbury; Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 2015
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 152
ISBN-13: 9781408867952; 9781408867969
Copyright date: 2015
Subjects: World War, 1939-1945; Fiction; Underground movements; History; War Underground movements
Work titles: Place de l'étoile
Description: Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Raphael Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune, may have lived during the Nazi Occupation, may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious collaborators and anti-Semites of the time, may even have been the lover of Eva Braun...or he may have been none of these things. But at the centre of this vortex is 'La Place de l'Etoile' - the Place of the Star - which is both the geographical and moral centre of Paris, and that place next the heart where French Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star, the symbol of their persecution.
Notes: Translated from the French.