Suspended Sentences
Three Novellas
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Suspended Sentences
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Narrated by:
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Bronson Pinchot
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Sean Runnette
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Arthur Morey
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By:
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Patrick Modiano
About this listen
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 listen to Modiano's trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
©2014 Originally published as Chien de printemps, 1993 by Editions du Seuil; Remise de peine, 1988 by Editions du Seuil; and Fleurs de ruine, 1991 by Editions du Seuil. Translation 2014 by Mark Polizzotti (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Missing Person
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- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 58
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
For 10 years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attache?
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1 out of 5 stars
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I'm a simple person
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By: Patrick Modiano
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The Years
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- Length: 8 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 226
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 198
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 199
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4 out of 5 stars
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Honeymoon
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- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4 out of 5 stars 25
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- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 58
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
For 10 years Guy Roland has lived without a past. His current life and name were given to him by his recently retired boss, Hutte, who welcomed him, a one-time client, into his detective agency. Guy makes full use of Hutte's files - directories, yearbooks, and papers of all kinds going back half a century - but leads to his former life are few. Could he really be that person in a photograph, a young man remembered by some as a South American attache?
-
1 out of 5 stars
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The Years
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- Narrated by: Anna Bentinck
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- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 226
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 198
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 199
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4 out of 5 stars
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Mixed Feelings
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Honeymoon
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- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 27
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 24
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Story4 out of 5 stars 25
Jean B. is submerged in a world where night and day, past and present have no demarcations. Having spent his entire adult life making documentary movies about lost explorers, Jean suddenly decides to abandon his wife and career and takes what seems to be a journey to nowhere. He spends his solitary days recounting or imagining the lives of Ingrid and Rigaud, a refugee couple he met more than 20 years ago. Little by little, their story takes on more reality than Jean's existence, as his excavation of the past slowly becomes an all-encompassing obsession.
-
5 out of 5 stars
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
- A Novel
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- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 10,934
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 10,143
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 10,141
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 39
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story4 out of 5 stars 21
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The first short-story collection in English by the acclaimed Chilean author Roberto Bolano. Winner of a 2005 PEN Translation Fund Award. "The melancholy folklore of exile", as Roberto Bolano once put it, pervades these 14 haunting stories. Bolano's narrators are usually writers grappling with private (and generally unlucky) quests, who typically speak in the first person, as if giving a deposition, like witnesses to a crime.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 301
January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postcard is delivered, Anne, the heroine of this novel, is moved to discover who sent it and why.
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A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place.
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 65
In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep the child. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days.
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Heartbreaking
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 951
For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stéphane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly eight years—in museums and cathedrals all over Europe—Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive comedy of blending, identity, and politics.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Phillip Roth would certainly listen!
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The Lover
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- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 32
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 26
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 26
Set in the prewar Indochina of Marguerite Duras's childhood, this is the haunting tale of a tumultuous affair between an adolescent French girl and her Chinese lover. In spare yet luminous prose, Duras evokes life on the margins of Saigon in the waning days of France's colonial empire, and its representation in the passionate relationship between two unforgettable outcasts.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Bold, harsh, haunting
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What listeners say about Suspended Sentences
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- John A.
- 03-27-22
A great book
A fantastic book that is very well written and developmental and maturative to a young man coming of age like myself. I found great relation in myself with this work and further highly recommend it.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Jay Quintana
- 02-22-15
About memories and impressions, not plot
If you could sum up Suspended Sentences in three words, what would they be?
Impressionistic. Subtle. Sad.
What did you like best about this story?
You're going to have to really work because nothing's straight forward. This isn't Hemingway or Chekhov. At times, one wonders where the author's going, but you understand what Modiano's saying at the end of each story.
Any additional comments?
The reason I rated the narration 3, is because it's the average of the narrators. Arthur Morey - 5 stars. Sean Runnette - 4 stars. Bronson Pinchot - 1 star. I've heard Pinchot narrate other books and loved those performances, but here, he reads with a French accent! It's annoying! It takes the focus off the book and puts it on the narrator. Bad idea.
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance2 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- michael
- 04-28-15
Not French
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
No. A non-stop listing of street names and buildings of long-gone Paris -- don't understand French nor do I know Paris so well that I could identify locations of streets. And not well enough to understand what Modiano was nostalgic about. Insider's view of Paris. Interesting POV though, having to do with shadows and remembrances of people rather than concrete people observed first-hand. People exist second- or third-hand.
Would you ever listen to anything by Patrick Modiano again?
If I could know what the best ones are and if I was sure it wasn't Franco-centric.
How did the narrator detract from the book?
There were three. One had a slight speech impediment and the last had a heavy French accent -- nice for atmosphere but not for listening.
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
No.
Any additional comments?
What's best Modiano book?
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2 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- W Perry Hall
- 01-31-15
Blissful Idiot
Each of these 3 novellas is an entertaining voyage bizarre, like cruising through the dreams/nightmares/memories of an elderly Parisian "blissful idiot," as he was labeled in the eponymous novella by the édenté matriarche excentrique of his "foster family" full of females/underworld paramours in a post-WWII Paris brothel.
This was worth buying, IMO (4.2 stars); but I'm not part of a redneck agenda.
Sean Runnette was, as usual, excellent. Arthur Morey, bless him, has the nerdiest voice on Audible. And I wish Bronson Pinchot would go back to the start of his career to remember why he didn't do accents. He's so caught up shuttling the French accent that he's nearly impossible to understand.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- David
- 04-17-15
Rue de Melancolie
These three novellas capture a melancholy but intriguing sense of the past in and around Paris. The narrator--who seems the same person in all three tales, an alter ego of the author--relates incidents from his childhood and early adulthood, when he was thrown in with mysterious characters, some shady, others alienated, all fascinating. He is something of an observer, more than a participant, in their lives. He's the young fellow who catalogs the amazing photographs of Jansen, as Jansen disengages from Paris and his friends and lovers. He's the 10-year-old, dropped by his traveling parents for a year in a Paris suburb with three rough women, women with male callers who do little favors for him and his brother and who create a loving ersatz household around him. And then in the third novella, he sits alone at a restaurant table on Sundays observing a group of glamorous but unsavory regulars at the table nearby, thinking about an unsolved possible crime from the 1930s.
Listening to the novellas, sometimes you miss important details because the narrator drops them in deadpan fashion and moves on. He is like a puddle-jumper, landing briefly on exotic islands and taking off again, with just a few important scenes before he shifts to another anecdote.
But the stories are so well written! The narrator is very likeable, and you root for him as he grows up and tries to make his way.
The three readers were all excellent. Bronson Pinchot reads the last novella with a heavy French accent. For those of us who watched him on television as Cousin Balki in the sitcom Perfect Strangers, you might think it's the same goofy character, his accent is so thick.
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Anonymous User
- 12-04-16
our inherent negative capability
? would it take winning a nobel prize for us to notice an author
? do the french have a unique weary perspective on modern life
? does our current age provide us more information but less certainty
these 3 novellas provide an introduction to patrick modiano
his moody, almost foggy stories are well known in europe
his recent nobel prize generated many new english translations
john keats ( 1817 ) negative capability
"...man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason..."
french history provides many episodes of moral compromise and exhaustion
the episodes leave is an indelible residue of spiritual and intellectual uncertainty
modiano knows this world well and makes it come alive for american readers
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3 people found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Donald
- 03-13-15
Magical reminiscences of France many years ago
Superbly written reflections of time gone by. Reminds me of Marcel Proust. I recommend the novellas without reservation.
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2 people found this helpful