Patrick Modiano

Real Rating: 4.25* of five, rounded up

The Publisher Says: A mesmerizing novel by Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano, now superbly translated for English-language readers

For long standing admirers of Modiano’s luminous writing as well as those readers encountering his work for the first time, Little Jewel will be an exciting discovery. Uniquely told by a young female narrator, Little Jewel is the story of a young woman adrift in Paris, imprisoned in an imperfectly remembered past. The city show more itself is a major character in Modiano’s work, and timeless moral ambiguities of the post-Occupation years remain hauntingly unresolved.

One day in the corridors of the metro, nineteen-year-old Thérèse glimpses a woman in a yellow coat. Could this be the mother who long ago abandoned her? Is she still alive? Desperate for answers to questions that have tormented her since childhood, Thérèse pursues the mysterious figure on a quest through the streets of Paris. In classic Modiano style, this novel explores the elusive nature of memory, the unyielding power of the past, and the deep human need for identity and connection.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I understand that many Modiano fanciers find this to be a slight, even a negligible, entry into his oeuvre. I am, of course, required to bow to their expertise since I do not have it. I will say, though, that if this is a slight entry into Author Modiano's catalog, the Nobel committee slept on this award by leaving it unawarded until 2014.

Thérèse, in common with most of us whose mothers weren't all that motherly, sees and feels the present with intensity and immediacy that our better-grounded peers seem to lack. It's a hypervigilance, an awareness of things that aren't always notable or even noticeable to others.

Thérèse's mother abandoned her for that most selfish of reasons, addiction, and so Thérèse can never really find her mother in her memories. We, listening to Thérèse, don't know what images among the blurry watercolors inside her head are real. Is her mother dead? Did she abandon Thérèse in that absolute and final way? Thérèse doesn't seem to know, so we don't know.

But that's the nature of the child of loss: We don't know what, if any, of our memories are valid, externally valid that is, and that is all we've come to trust. Validation must come from outside when your life has consisted of things you simply can't control, can't even influence...they just Happen, from the outside. So that is where Reality lies.

And lie she does, does Reality.

That is the genius of this work. It's not the usual third person exploration of the Idea of Identity, the Scenes of Paris, that Modiano is so very very good at. Thérèse is telling us about the grey, grim Paris of her life. Thérèse is putting herself in the frame deliberately, and that is unique. To Modiano, whose work is always at a very French remove from the immediacy of American novels. To Thérèse, whose marginal life is never even the center of her own thoughts...that position belongs to her mother. (That there is a father is self-evident, but one it never treated to a thought centering him. He exists only because The Mother got pregnant by him, whoever he was.)

We, the audience, see that there are men...an older pharmacist, a young student...who care for the waiflike Thérèse. She remains unable to process their proffered affection. It is here that Modiano achieves something I am absolutely stunned by: In a novel told all in first person, he manages the feat of making the emotional reality of other characters as clear to the reader as are Thérèse's disordered thoughts. It is a rare stylistic attempt, and it succeeds more often than not.

Why, you'll be excused for asking, isn't this a five-star review? Because, ma amie, Thérèse is nineteen and solipsistic in the extreme as are all emotionally abandoned children. It grows wearisome to trudge around after this yellow-raincoated woman to no avail, with no closure, by no authority empowered to address her. I don't for an instant think this is Thérèse's mother. I'm familiar with the trajectory of addiction and it's unlikely that someone lied to the girl Thérèse about her mother's fate. That's the sort of lie that comes with good intentions. No one's ever had an intention towards Thérèse, good or bad.

The ending of this novel is not really an ending. It is a place where we can leave Thérèse, like a safe street-corner near a police station, but knowing that we're out of there and no longer responsible to looking on at her life's messy, pale, unlikely to come into focus, trajectory. It's the proper place to leave her. It's what the entire trajectory of the story demands.

It feels a bit like we, the only people who will ever see Thérèse from the inside, are repeating the cruelty and abandonment that has been and will be her lot.

Brilliant. Unsettling. Evoking the eternal question that consuming art, novels in particular, wrenches forth from the sensitive: Is this just fancied-up voyeurism? Am I not being the low-life peeper that I condemn when she's listening at bedroom doors, he's got one eye on the braless busty babe? show less

Patrick Modiano’s books are best savored, and after a few you know what to generally expect. A trickle of memories, past events, shadowy figures, in and around Paris.

Jean Bosmans is a man “used to living in the narrow margin between reality and dream, letting them illuminate each other, sometimes blend together.” Jean has friends who seem to be probing his background and taking him to places associated with his youth, with no apparent reason or motive. Just when you suspect he’s show more paranoid, turns out they, or their associates, do want something from him. What it is isn’t revealed until the last page – another Modiano trademark.

Jean disappears outside of Paris for a while and starts writing a book featuring his ghosts from the past and present, then returns to Paris, a city that now feels new. “Summer had come, a summer unlike any he’d experienced before, a summer with light so limpid and intense that those phantoms had finally evaporated.” As with most of his books, it comes down to some form of loss. “Most of the people he’d known in the past fifteen years had disappeared.” show less

A young man, twenty, walking in Paris at night is grazed by a car driven by a woman named Jacqueline Beausergent. He feels he has known her in the past. He leaves the encounter with a bandage and an envelope of cash after recovering in a hospital.

Written from the perspective of an older man, he recalls this incident, other memories of his younger self, and of his estranged father; Patrick Modiano’s favorite themes. The young man is alone. His father had him arrested at 17, an attempt show more “to get rid of him.” A woman that is possibly his mother attacks him outside his apartment building.

He searches for Jacqueline Beausergent, moving through Paris at night, looking for clues and her car. Dreams feature prominently in the story, and some of the things that happen to him at night are possibly dreams. He observes and moves and knows he will find her again. “Remain still and silent and blend into the background.”

A passage describes the purpose and beauty of his night wanderings:
“…at certain hours of the night, you can slip into a parallel world: an empty apartment where the light wasn’t switched off, even a small dead-end street. It’s where you find objects lost long ago: a lucky charm, a letter, an umbrella, a key, and cats, dogs and horses that were lost over the course of your life.” show less

These three short novellas — “Afterimage,” “Suspended Sentences,” and “Flowers of Ruin” — originally published over a five year period in the 1990s, share a mood of wistful nostalgia, fleeting and uncertain memory, with an undercurrent of menace. Modiano appears to draw upon his own life, especially his childhood immediately before the years of the Occupation in Paris. On the surface it seems as though he is recounting specific events, drawing together memories. But nothing show more solid coalesces, as least in terms of plot. Rather we see the city of Paris emerging out of layer after layer of different moments in mid-century, with a steady recitation of street names, addresses, business establishments, and sometimes people, many of which no longer exist. It is a Paris that corresponds, perhaps, only to the author’s own memory and imagination. And certainly what, precisely, that Paris evokes is elusive at best.

This is the Paris of noir films, of George Brassai photographs, of fog and shadow, before the construction of the périphérique wiped out whole neighbourhoods and histories, when France was not yet reconciled to its collaborative past during the Occupation, and identities might be lost, invented, or exchanged merely through the theft of someone’s identity papers. That Patrick Modiano can’t settle on a clear image of this time is rather the point. Like his contemporary, W.G. Sebald, he endlessly mines an ineffable recent history in which memory and guilt, culpability and innocence, blur. Unlike Sebald, Modiano is teasing out the threads of familial responsibility rather than national shame. And thus there is always an undertone of accusation, especially against his father and whatever unsavoury acts he may have participated in, either willingly or through coercion, in those dark days.

The writing is almost picaresque as it catches the frothy tops of these waves of memory. It never bogs down or sinks in an effort to explicate fully or justify. Which is not to say that the inconclusive inevitably leads to the unsettled. Rather, Modiano’s embrace of the elusive suggests a wider, more encompassing, comprehension of the whole and an unwillingness to judge it prematurely. Certainly fascinating and definitely recommended. show less