Patrick Modiano’s work casts a wary look at personal and collective histories of the French mid-twentieth century. Rather than nostalgia, this looking-back is imbued with a “sense of emptiness that comes with the knowledge of what has been destroyed, razed to the ground.” Each of Modiano’s novels is, in the words of Adam Thirlwell, “a new restatement of a single unsolvable crime.” Whether that crime manifests as the sin of a whole nation (Nazi collaboration in The Occupation Trilogy) or the sin of one person (murder or betrayal), it inflicts a moral injury more than a material one: it is the