NP but it's "in the air".

[Mark Kohut]

I have just read Nobelist Modiano's first novel,
*La Place De L' Etoile.*

A satiric comic novel--love the Groucho Marx allusions, including to the
narrator's appearance
--- with an incredibly unreliable narrator, published in 1968, it
certainly, subversively, courageously, said Take That or Fuck Y'all to the
French
public, particularly the Intelligentsia, particularly Sartre (among others
I don't
know and can't get an easy take on because of the quicksand narrator....)
almost as if there is no beach under all those paving stones of
intellectuals....

But a couple tropes emerge: "perverted' sex happenings get used
metaphorically for
control and collaboration of WW2 Leaders, reminiscent of our Plist writer
(and the book ends with an appearance of Freud himself) including, maybe
(if I read it right) , homosexual act(s) for
"perverted' control/Dominance and

Skewering stereotypes, the Jew, the Nazi, compliant women, the Jewish white
slave trade in women,
'strong' men,  makes this another example from that rich comic tradition.
Lists of people, some real, some fictional scattered around to take his
jabs.

"in Europe we'll be happy. We'll be able to read Kafka to our children" is
just one joke a double agent kind of woman sez who tries
to smuggle our narrator away....
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