Ring Roads, for which Modiano was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix du Rom
an (1972), is the story of a young Jew, Serge, in search of his father, Chalva,
who disappeared from his life ten years earlier. He finds him trying to survive
the war years in the unlikely company of black marketeers, anti-Semites and pros
titutes, putting his meagre and not entirely orthodox business skills at the ser
vice of those who have no interest in him or his survival. Ring Roads is a brill
iant, almost hallucinatory evocation of the uneasy, corrupt years of the Occupat
ion and like The Night Watch is both cruel and tender - savage in its depiction
of the anti-Semitic newspaper editor, the bullying ex-Foreign Legionnaire and th
e former prostitute, who treat Chalva with ever more threatening contempt; tende
r in its attempt to understand and identify with the Jew who cannot see the dang
er he courts.
