Patrick Modiano: Chien de printemps | Afterimage (1993)

There surely can't be many marks of similarity between San-Antonio's and Modiano's work, although both write detective stories. But whereas San-Antonio is obsessed with playing with language, Modiano plays with identity and memory.

Modiano is concerned with scraps of memory that can't be moulded into a whole, and sometimes the reader is reminded of Sartre's La Nausée, with the protagonist striving to hold the internal and the external together. One example of this is when the narrator visits the village of Fossombrone (Seine-et-Marne) in vague hopes of visiting the Meyendorffs, former friends of the photographer Francis Jansen whose life he's trying to retrace thirty years on. Meyendorff was once a doctor, and his American wife a spiritualist, trying to bring back the dead (which the narrator is probably doing). Adrift in a place he doesn't know, and desperately aware that his search here is no doubt fruitless, he reads the headlines of a newspaper he's bought in an attempt to put himself back in touch with some kind of reality.

Another example of existential crisis is on the last day the narrator ever saw Jansen in 1964, when the photographer briefly leaves him outside the Café de la Paix near l'Opéra. The narrator checks if the weighing machine is still in the nearby hotel entrance, where he and his father regularly went to weigh themselves. It is, so he takes a coin and repeats the same action. Then he feels strange and has to sit down at a table on the crowded café terrace, the only thing holding him to the external world being the pink ticket giving his weight. Jansen joins him, concerned about his young friend's problem, which he dismissively says he too has, and calls them 'black holes'.

Jansen has to leave Paris with the huge collection of photos the narrator's been cataloguing, but about which the photographer seems little concerned. Yes, Jansen too has an existential problem, and people and things are losing there distinctness for him.

Such is the nature of this slight book, a quest for a person who's gone without a trace: perhaps there would be no trace today, in a world where it has been said (obviously incorrectly) that if it's not on the internet then it doesn't exist. Télérama, in a sentence on the back cover, says that with this book Modiano has re-found the strength and profundity of his best works. That's quite possible, as I thought that Chien de printemps is quite a fascinating book.

My Patrick Modiano posts:
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Patrick Modiano: Rue des boutiques obscures | Missing Person
Patrick Modiano: Les Boulevards de ceinture | Ring Roads
Patrick Modiano: L'Horizon
Patrick Modiano: Chien de printemps | Afterimage
Patrick Modiano: La Petite Bijou