However,it is to be observed that an astonishing number of characters go missing or vanish or have committed suicide in Modiano’s work.In ‘The Place of the Star’ the protagonist Raphaël Schlemilovitch abandons his own identity with anti-Semitic consciousness in different places with different personalities to gain his own interests; in ‘The night watch’ the protagonist abandons his true identity bearing two aliases and possessing a fake Nansen passport, a status of persona non grata, no place to find peace and not any trustworthy one whom he may express his agony for getting relief from pangs of conscience; in ‘Ring roads’ the unnamed protagonist with pangs of remorse searches for his Jew father who abandons him and even attempts to kill him by pushing him under the wheels of an underground train;in ‘Inside the Sad House’ the protagonist named Victor Chmara abandons Paris as he feels the atmosphere of menace around him and the fear that grips him.
Besides, he is scared to death, a sensation he has never been without; in ‘Missing Person’ the protagonist Guy Roland being abandoned by his boss has been free to search for himself and even earlier he had been abandoned in the mountains, in the snow, left to die; in ‘The Search Warrant’, Dora Bruder abandons her school and family and is murdered by the Nazis; in ‘Paris nocturne’ the anonymous protagonist tries to keep his past events in order so that he may at least save himself from getting abandoned forever; in Pedigree: A Memoir,the protagonist Modiano himself tells us he was abandoned, for all intents and purposes, by both his mother and his father, and by his brother Rudy,
who died at the age of 10;in ‘In the Café of lost youth’,the protagonist Jacqueline Choureau, whose maiden name was Delanque but was known as Louki, abandons her husband and disappears without a trace and, ultimately, commits suicide; in ‘So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood’ the protagonist Jean Daragane has built up a life abandoned within the stillness of his Paris apartment. He tries to recaptures his past and its significance to his identity abandoned in his own neighbourhood.
However, here in this literary collection of mine out of Modiano’s literary works the ten novelettes—let’s say ‘Modiano’s Decalogy— have been selected not randomly but categorically on the basis of scrutinizing the writer’s own focus reflected in the subject-matters of those novellas. These 10 novels reflect the introvert writer’s inner sight from different dimensional viewpoints saturated with the nostalgic attraction to the same places & surroundings trodden again and again as well as the times passed away through different life-phases: childhood, adolescence, youth afflicted with memory, oblivion and reminiscence.
With each new novel a different pattern of viewpoint partakes of Modiano’s observational mind-set developed in the same areas of Paris.In his novels places, individuals, historical references may be repeated but observing points do vary from one story to another within the same scenario of German occupation.The story of every new novel focuses on some insightful meaning anew centering around the same subjects— memory,oblivion,reminiscence—in connection with the German occupation.
Modiano intends to improvise a missing link of 20 years since his being at the age of 21 to feel the pangs of the Jews undergoing the traumatized decades of the German occupation. The way Modiano started writing his novels and completed the novels serially so far is as though he took a project to highlight the holocaust of the then German occupation, having affected every class of the Jewish community hidden in every corner of Paris, so that he might not miss any part of that horrified Jewish lives under the German occupation.
Being one of Modiano’s trio in connection with L’Occupation, named after the detestable and divisive subjugation of France by Nazi Germany during 1941–1944, ‘The place of the star’, translated by Frank Wynne from the French novel ‘La place de L’Étoile’,has turned out to be the most frenetic. In the novel the story of Raphaël Schlemilovitch, a French Jew haunted by the war and thoughts of persecution just after the war, playing the role of the hero as well as the narrator telling the story in a hallucinatory manner is recounted in autobiographical manner.
In his way of surviving or not surviving the holocaust, Raphaël Schlemilovitch meets many famous European Jews and gentiles who have made history.Through his observing many lives in different places , Raphaël Schlemilovitch has shown always a sarcastic attitude towards the characters. Throughout the novel, Patrick Modiano having gone under some sort of delusion tried to discover himself now and then through the protagonist Raphaël Schlemilovitch with anti-Semitic consciousness in different places with different personalities like Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, Charlie Chaplin, Prussian Immanuel Kant, Danish Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Satre, Marcel Proust, etc, along with fictional characters. At last, Sigmund Freud has been seen to be busy to rescue him from his state of hallucinatory delusions, Jewish neuroses and Yiddish paranoia. Being a Jew, Raphaël Schlemilovitch has been seen to malign the Jews.
In The place of the star the young Modiano had gathered together every controversial and excitable issue of twentieth-century French history and literature –and whatever else created by his imagination—and thrown them together in this uncontrollably exuberant tale of a Jewish collaborator called Raphael Schlemilovitch. Dreyfus, Anti-Semitism, treachery, Auschwitz, collaboration, the Gestapo, Action Française, and ill-motive all have been conducive to develop the neurotic scenario of this picaresque novel. Upon exploring the fraught psychic landscape of schlemilovitch,Jew turned Nazi sympathizer it’s been observed that hideous offence is freely given and taboos are frankly violated in this novel.