Patrick Modiano

As I was reading the three novellas that make up Suspended Sentences, It was as if I were reading paintings. Modiano’s dream-like sequences had my mind flashing with images from paintings such as those of Monet and other Impressionists . His descriptions are so detailed, that although I am familiar with Paris, I realize I only know only a small part of the city. I wish I could go there now, and trace the places that Modiano so exquisitely describes.

The novellas are classified as fiction show more but are clearly autobiographical. The narrator looks back at his past and there are events that are distorted or possibly missing, suspended in time.

Afterimage (Chien de printemps)
The narrator is a young man who volunteers to catalog a photographer’s works. There is an illusive quality here, and it feels at times that we are in a world blurred like a half-developed photo. Only the place-names are solid.
The narrator loses touch with the photographer, who eventually disappears never to be found. Only the box of photos he leaves behind confirms his reality.

Suspended Sentences (Quartier perdu)
Here the child Patoche and his brother Rudy are growing up parentless in a large house in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. They are cared for by a motley group of women.The brothers try to make sense of what they observe, and invent names for their carers such as “Snow White”. They are innocents in an environment that the reader will see as seedy. When Snow White takes them to warehouses and tells them to wait they do so unaware of what is happening inside. Various men come and go,bringing expensive presents for the boys. But the boys see only a fairy land-like place and believe that the Parisian strip clubs are circuses in canvas tents.

Abruptly, like photographer in Afterimage, the adults disappear completely, and Patoche is thrown into the streets of Paris alone. At this stage, we lose sight of Rudy.

Flowers of Ruin (Fleurs de ruine)
Like its title, this novella embraces darkness and ruin. The narrator is suspicious of the past and decides to investigate the unsolved deaths of a couple that occurred in 1933. Although at the time many believed that their deaths were suicides, a strange waiter may have misled the police. The narrator is convinced that this very waiter may have shown up when he was in Paris in the sixties. There is again, reference to warehouses and black-marketing. Perhaps the man was a Nazi collaborator. Or had someone stolen his identity? The men of the Suspended Sentences novella are reimagined. The warehouses, the corruption, the unclear identities.

He meets a man who leads a double-life, who is not as he seems. Could he be the waiter? He claims he is a marquis. The narrator comes across him for the last time where the so-called marquis is a tour guide for submissive Japanese tourists.

The sunny Paris of the AfterImage has gone, and the dark suspicious men of Suspended Sentences return to narrator’s fractured memories. The lightness of the photographer’s photos in Afterimage has gone. The narrator has only one choice; that is to escape France. And there the story ends, suspended in time.

As for the book that contains the novellas, there is no defining plot or logical narrative. Rather the three novellas merge splatter -like into something resembling a Jackson Pollock painting.

Highly recommended. show less

This short novel by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano is a beautiful reverie about memory, melancholy and regret. A documentary movie maker, tired of his life of traipsing around the world after adventure and exotic cultures and locales, wonders what it's all been about, and begins to dwell upon a chance encounter he'd had many years ago with a couple 20 years his senior when he learns, by random chance, of the woman's suicide. His recreation of the couple's lives and his meditations about show more his own are woven together seamlessly to produce a vivid waking dream of a narrative. show less

Louki was her name at the café Condé. But she was Jacqueline originally. Unless she only ever became who she was when she was named again, when her life became a fixed point for other lives passing by. She was a creature of the neutral zones, those grey areas of Paris in the 1950s where everyone is travelling on an alternate passport. And neither her boyfriend, sometimes called Roland, nor her husband, nor the less the savoury people from her past appear to know the first thing about her. show more But was there ever anything to know?

Told obliquely by different characters, including Louki herself, this highly evocative tale captures a certain wistful bohemian existence which may not be accessible to us now. This is Modiano at his best, just beyond the edge of narrative. The kind of writing that, if the “events” of the story were lined up in linear order, the entire sense would be lost. I was transfixed.

Definitely recommended. show less

Patrick Modiano: Dora Bruder

In 1988, Modiano stumbled across an ad in the New Year's Eve 1941 edition of Paris Soir: "Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height I m 55, oral-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes." Another official mention, nine months later, in September, 1942 marks the end of Dora's life: her name on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz. Modiano was sized with this young girl , unknown show more to him and to the world. He undertook a ten-year investigation to reconstruct Dora's life through official records, which are scanty, and reminiscences of one family member.

This is book defies categorization. It is not a novel, nor strictly non-fiction, nor strictly a biography, nor strictly history. It might be called 'speculative biography'. It situates a person, a life, within a known historical period (the persecution of Jews in Paris under the German occupation in the 1941-42), and uses knowledge of that time to speculate on Dora's actions and motivations as the darkness closed inexorably around her. As unusual as it is, this is a beautiful book. In teasing out as much as he can of Dora's life through investigation and imagination, Modiano makes this young French girl real, and gives recognition of her life beyond a notation on a list, even though the paucity of detail means that we see her through a glass darkly. Modiano makes her an individual among the nameless millions who went to their deaths and are now unheralded, unknown, completely forgotten finally with the deaths of those who may have remembered them. Many did not have even that short, tenuous afterlife and instantly became as if they had never been.

This is a book about identity and memory, about one life exhumed that stands for the millions now unnamed and unknown. It is about the impermanence of everything. It is about the oblivion of individuals, not just in the natural order of things through time, but also because of deliberate efforts, such as the purging and destruction of records to protect the perpetrators. It takes an deliberate, difficult, opposite effort to resurrect a life with all of its unknowns. As Modiano says, " It takes time for what has been erased to resurface. Traces survive in registers, and nobody knows where these registers are hidden, and who has custody of them, and whether or not these custodians are willing to let you see them. Or perhaps they have quite simply forgotten that these registers exist." Seeking that information can also be deliberately blocked by, "those sentinels of oblivion whose role is to guard a shameful secret and deny access to anybody seeking to uncover the least trace of a person's existence."

Houses, hotels, places of work, streets can all situate a time, perhaps help to imagine the life of a person who lived and worked there. But again, nothing is fixed. Buildings are "razed to the ground", new edifices thrown up, roads reconfigured and redirected, so that even the physical environment is gone. The present bears no relation to the past, reflecting the fate of the persons: "They [Dora's parents] are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous. Inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered that they had lived. Often, what I know about them amounts to no more than a simple address. And such topographical precision contrasts with what we shall never know about their life--this blank, this mute block of the unknown." It is this "mute block of the unknown" that Modiano tries to pierce with respect to Dora.

This is also a story about the cumulation of circumstances that channel a life, and in Dora's case, quite probably lead to her death. Dora's father did not include her in the mandatory census of Jewish persons living in France, so she slips below official notice. Dora was placed in a Christian boarding school. Could she have remained hidden there through the war? But we don't know her circumstances: how much was known about her, how did others treat her, how did she react, what did she feel? What we do know is that she was described as independent and head-strong, and she ran away from the school in December, 1941. Her father waited thirteen days before going to the police who advised him to place the notice in the paper. And now he had drawn attention to the fact of Dora's existence:

"A father tries to find his daughter, reports her disappearance at a police station, and a wanted notice is inserted in an evening newspaper. But the father himself is 'wanted'. Parents lose all trace of their daughter and, one 19 March, one of them [Dora's father] disappears in his turn, as if the winter that year was cutting people off from one another, muddying and wiping out their tracks to the point where their existence is in doubt. And there is no redress. The very people whose job it is to search for you are themselves complying dossiers, the better to ensure that, once found, you will disappear again--this time for good."

A sixteen year old girl, beset by who knows what pressures, and hopes, and fears, and desires, and dreams runs away. Not an unheard of occurrence, but for Dora, "everything in the city of December, 1941, its curfews, its soldiers, its police, was hostile, intent on her destruction. At sixteen years old, without knowing why, she had the entire world against her."

A police report from April, 1942 notes that Dora had returned, but we know nothing of the circumstances; perhaps the arrest of her father led to her go home to be with her mother? Modiano could find nothing on where Dora had been, what she had done for the three and half months she had disappeared; but she had survived in some underground world below official notice; could she have continued to do so throughout the war? The next relevant document confirms that on June 15, the police had returned Dora to her home. We don't know how long she had been away this second time, nor how the police had become involved; was she arrested and if so, for what? We don't know what happened after the 15th, but on the 19th of June, Dora was listed with other young women sent to a prison called Tourelles which was a staging area for transfer to the internment camp at Drancy, itself a staging area for transportation to Auschwitz. Dora was sent to Drancy where she reunited with her father. On September 18, father and daughter departed Drancy with thousands of others on a convoy of trains to Auschwitz. Five months after her husband and daughter, Dora's mother was put on a convoy from Drancy to Auschwitz.

Without trying to delve into their lives, in places Modiano also lists the names of other young women arrested and transferred with Dora, as if to pay respect to them, to recognize their existence, their humanity, to give them some memory through the mention of their names in a book. His ten year search also made Modiano reflect on his own youth in Paris, his relationship with his father, and the lives of so many crushed by the war. As he says in an intriguing statement: "So many friends whom I never knew disappeared in 1945, the year I was born."

Modiano ends his book with this:

"I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in who's company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped for the second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Depot, the barracks, the camps, History, time--everything that defiles and destroys you--have been able to take away from her."

I disagree with Modiano. I know that he was trying to give Dora something unique and individual that defined her, something beyond the reach of those who defile and destroy, but when they took her life, the defilers and destroyers took it all. Except for Modiano's book, they would have taken the memory of her existence too, as they did for millions.

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I think Jenny Erpenbeck captured this sense in her book, Visitation. In this novel, Doris is a 12 year old Jewish girl living in the Lodz ghetto. We have seen her earlier in the house by the lake that is at the centre of the book, but now she is hiding in a wall after the area of the ghetto has been cleared of all inhabitants. She is discovered:

"Of the one hundred and twenty people in the boxcar, approximately thirty suffocate during the two-hour trip. As a motherless child, she is considered an inconvenience that might interfere with things running smoothly, and so the moment they arrive she is herded off to the side along with a few old people who cannot walk any longer and the ones who went mad during the trip, she is ushered past a pile of clothing as high as a mountain--like the Nackliger, she can't help thinking and remembers her own smile that she smiled that day when the gardner told her the funny name of the underwater shoal. For two minutes, a pale, partly cloudy sky arches above her just the way it would look down by the lake right before it rained, for two minutes she inhales the scent of pine trees she knows so well, but she cannot see the pine trees themselves because of the tall fence. Has she really come home? For two minutes she can feel the sand beneath her shoes along with a few pieces of flint and pebbles made of quartz or granite; then she takes off her shoes forever and goes to stand on the board to be shot.

Nothing is nicer than diving with your eyes open. Diving down as far as the shimmering legs of your mother and father who have just come back from swimming and now are wading to shore through the shallow water. Nothing is more fun than to tickle them and to hear, muffled by the water, how they shriek because they know it will make their child happy.

For three years the girl took piano lessons, but now, while her dead body slides down into the pit, the word piano is taken back from human beings, now the backflip on the high bar that the girl could perform better than her schoolmates is taken back, along with all the motions a swimmer makes, the gesture of seizing hold of a crab is taken back, as well as all the basic knots to be learned for sailing, all these things are taken back into uninventedness, and finally, last of all, the name of the girl herself is taken back, the name no one will ever again call her by: Doris." show less