The announcement that Modiano had won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature came, it seems, as a surprise to many. ‘Patrick Modiano plutôt que Philip Roth, ou Haruki Murakami. Les académiciens suédois qui attribuent le prix Nobel de littérature ne détestent pas étonner le monde. Mais si la surprise est de taille, elle est aussi excellente’. His French readers were surprised, then delighted; a popular writer since the publication of his very first novels, Modiano has been a steadfast bestseller in his native country for well over forty years. Readers, critics and journalists were united in their delight that the prize had gone to the self-effacing, modest and famously inarticulate writer; satisfied, too, that his numerous novels, addictive for many and translated into thirty-six languages, had been thus rewarded.

Modiano's Nobel acceptance speech–which his fans had awaited with a certain trepidation, aware as they were of his disastrous appearances on Apostrophes in the past –was, despite starting with a reference to his tendency to ‘balbutiement’, an admirably fluent account of his trajectory as a writer, his favourite themes, and his place in modern French literature. Modestly claiming that his readers knew more than he did about his own novels, and comparing his experience of writing to driving slowly in slippery and low visibility conditions, he went on to describe a feature of his novels that has been much remarked upon throughout his career, their resemblance to each other:

This quality of self-resemblance, or consistency, is one of the reasons why the present volume–which is a new, augmented edition of a previous study–has become possible.