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

Patrick Modiano: La Petite Bijou (2001)

Patrick Modiano's La Petite Bijou is, it probably goes without saying, a kind of existential detective story, imbued with a somnambulistic ambiance, in which the nineteen-year-old female first-person narrator seems to drift through life, lost in the labyrinthine underground corridors of Châtelet, lost in a temporal confusion, not knowing how to distinguish truth from fiction. Her mother used to call her La Petite Bijou, 'The Little Jewel', but then she wasn't much of a mother to her, and her uncle Jean Borand, who used to look after her, may have been her father. But her mother died years ago in Morocco, or so she was told.

Until, that is, she sees a woman in a well-worn yellow coat she thinks is her mother, follows her to a phone booth, a café where she has a few kirs, follows her to her home, obsesses about her, but never actually comes into contact with her. Her mother's real name is Suzanne Cardère (she thinks), although she changed it to Countess Sonia Dauyé, which is not the same name on the door of her the woman's home: that is Boré. It becomes obvious that the identity of her resurrected mother is as nebulous as the thoughts of the protagonist, whose real name (again, she thinks) is Thérèse.

In a bookshop Thérèse meets a man called Moreau, well let's say Moreau-Badmaev, who doesn't do forenames, and there develops a platonic relationship in which she eventually comes to talk about herself, even about the scraps of memory of her past which she keeps in a box. Moreau-Badmaev works as a translator, translating many languages from radio programmes, although it's not known who he works for. Translation is understanding, clarifying things, as this novel often clarifies times of day, and gives exact addresses and telephone numbers: it's as if the book is making a definite stand against itself, against the uncertain nature of the plot.

Thérèse hasn't got her bac and just drifts from casual job to casual job, such as the one she has of child-minder to the Valadiers, parents whose names (forenames Michel and Véra) may well be false, who don't seem concerned for their unnamed child (a psychological projection of La Petite Bijou herself?), seem constantly on the move, never settled, and even ready to abandon their daughter.

And then there's the woman pharmacist who takes so much care of Thérèse, wants to take her away for a few days to take her out of herself, and again seems (like Moreau-Badmaev) to be doing this for no motive other than altruism. And she gives Thérèse some tablets, with which she (intentionally or as if in a haze?) takes an overdose.

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

Fleur Pellerin now has time to read Modiano

Yesterday Fleur Pellerin, the French Ministre de la Culture et de la Communication, was sacked from the post she had held for only eighteen months. The world can only ask why she wasn't sacked earlier, or indeed how she came to occupy the post in the first place.

The Nobel Prize for Literature is arguably the most important international event in the literary calendar, and was won by French novelist Patrick Modiano on 6 October 2014, after which Fleur Pellerin had lunch with him: I can't imagine what they talked about, although Pellerin told Maïtena Biraben that the lunch was wonderful, and that the two of them 'laughed a great deal'.

Biraben was questioning Pellerin on Canal plus's Supplément programme on 26 October 2014, and perfectly logically asked what her favorite Modiano book was: 'Euh, euh...' Not only couldn't Pellerin think of a Modiano book but she hadn't read one of his books, hadn't even read a book in the last two years because of the pressures of work. Many people might consider book reading as part of the work of a minister of culture, and many people throughout the world reacted in a very negative light to this confession. OK, this was obviously a wonderful opportunity for the right-wing Le Figaro to score political points by bemoaning the lack of culture in the government's cultural figurehead, but the paper evidently had a very strong point.

How can a governmental representative of French culture have lunch with a French winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature and not raise the subject of, well, literature? The reminder that the mighty André Malraux once held the post Pellerin held until yesterday makes her original appointment look not only stupid but really bizarre. What next? Donald Trump for president of the USA? Pellerin made things even worse for herself by saying how shocked she was by global reactions to her idiocy. But at least the wonderful news is that she's gone now, and she missed out on the Villa Médicis jolly. No wonder she reportedly burst into tears on hearing of her dismissal: she'd been onto a good thing for far too long.

Patrick Modiano: Les Boulevards de ceinture | Ring Roads (1972)

I've only read two Modiano novels apart from this, and since his Nobel Prize for Literature win I've wondered – there being so many excellent living French authors around – if he actually deserved it. OK, most writers pen the same book over and over again, but isn't Modiano, with his obsessions with detective tales, Jewishness, the streets of Paris, (multiple) identity, etc, well, just a bit too samey?

Les Boulevards de ceinture (translated into English as Ring Roads) has me thinking though. The novel begins (and incidentally ends) with a photograph of the interior of Le Clos-Foucré restaurant in a village on the edge of the Fontainebleau woods. This photograph morphs into the living characters in it, the main ones being the dodgy publisher Murraille, the dodgy ex-legionnaire Marcheret, and the dodgy fat man who now calls himself Deyckecaire.

In fact, in the Occupation period of Modiano's novel it's difficult to find anyone who's not dodgy. The narrator calls himself Serge Alexandre because he's concealing his true identity from his father, who is in fact Deyckecaire (who's also using a false name). His father used to sell fraudulent stamps, and then graduated to lots of other things when found out, and was with his son when he used to forge signatures and dedications on books to make large sums of money.

That was when the narrator was seventeen, before his father tried to push him under a train, and has been tracking his father down after ten years because he's forgiven him. Hard to swallow this forgiveness? Yes of course, if you take it literally, and it's hard to swallow the fact that the father doesn't recognise the son after ten years, and did the narrator really murder Lestandi?

Many questions come easily to the surface in this hallucinatory, almost surreal work in which a lot is not what it seems to be, where much is imbued with the substance of dreams. There's definitely more to Modiano than first appearances suggest, and I shall be looking further into his odd world.

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

Patrick Modiano: Rue des Boutiques Obscures | Missing Person (1978)

Last May I made a blog post about Patrick Modiano's L'Horizon, which was very favorable. Modiano's Rue des Boutiques Obscures (1978) (translated as Missing Person) won the prix Goncourt that year, and although this is certainly not the second Modiano novel I've read it's the only one I've concentrated on bearing in mind the author's Nobel prize win last October. Was it deserved? Personally, I've not decided but shall continue to read Modiano books until I have.

Rue des Boutiques Obscures is – as might be expected of a Modiano novel – an existential detective story, and a rather complex one. Here we have private detective Guy Roland made unemployed by his boss Hutte, who has decided to retire to Nice. Roland's name was that on the passport Hutte gave him, as Roland – employed by Hutte for eight years – forgot his own name some time before, along with everything that happened in his past.

What follows is a detective story in which Roland chases his own past, initially leading him into all kinds of situations with those who were largely indirectly part of that past. Roland's search takes him to many places in Paris and later beyond, but there is a great deal of hard slog through telephone directories ancient and modern, as well as pretending to be who he is not, before he is led to people he doesn't recognise but who recognise him, and before he can at least begin to realise who he once was. But, of course, we're all made of scraps of this and scraps of that, eventually coming together as a recognisable jigsaw puzzle. Probably much like Modiano's work as a whole.

My Patrick Modiano posts:
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
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

Patrick Modiano and the Nobel effect

Winning the Nobel Prize for Literature can have a very fast and dramatic effect on sales, and following the announcement of Patrick Modiano's win yesterday afternoon, in France alone he currently has thirteen books in Amazon's bestselling 100. The biggest sellers among those are Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (published earlier this month) in second place, while in third place is Rue des boutiques obscures (1982), in seventh is La Place de l'étoile (1975), and in ninth is Dora Bruder (1999).

The Nobel has strong teeth, and Modiano's win has nudged Valérie Trierweiler's hilarious anti-François Hollande rant Merci pour ce moment (2014) down to fourth place.

Conversely, following the second Goncourt selection announcement three days ago only two of the eight contenders make an appearance in Amazon's top 100: David Foenkinos's Charlotte (39) and Éric Reinhardt's L'amour et les forêts (98).

The only review I've made of any Modiano novel – L'Horizon (2010) – is here.

Patrick Modiano: L'Horizon (2010)

I've missed the obvious again. Several years ago I read two of Patrick Modiano's novels consecutively, and while I understood that the author writes a form of detective story, the point that this is essentially existential detective work escaped me. Kafka vaguely looms over this novel like a hazy godfather, paranoia is the guiding sensation, and a surrealistic atmosphere is enhanced by dreams, different times often merging seamlessly from section to section.

L'Horizon has two main characters: Jean Bosmans, a writer in search of a woman he knew forty years before, when he was in continual flight from a menacing couple, one perhaps his mother and the other a defrocked priest; and Margaret De Coz, the woman Bosmans knew and who is also shown at different times in the past and is also in continual flight, but from the menacing Boyaval, a man she scarcely knows.

Bosmans feels guilty but doesn't know why, he can't relate, can't make contact, he bearly exists, even sits with only one buttock on a seat as if undecided between stasis or movement.

The relationship between Margaret and Bosmans was brief, but seems very important to Bosmans at least, although here – until the end at least – we are only aware of Margaret's life before and when she knew Bosmans: she meets Boyaval in Annecy, but he follows her to Switzerland, from which she escapes from him to the relative anonymity of Paris, where she meets the fellow outsider Bosmans.

Having looked online Bosmans goes to Berlin to find Margaret, although the book ends before he goes into her bookshop.

My other posts on Patrick Modiano:
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Patrick Modiano: La Petite Bijou
Patrick Modiano: Rue des boutiques obscures | Missing Person
Patrick Modiano: Les Boulevards de ceinture | Ring Roads

Patrick Modiano: Chien de printemps | Afterimage

Éric Fottorino: Baisers de cinéma (2007)

On the first page of Éric Fottorino's Baisers de cinéma ('Cinema Kisses') there is a mention of the fire that occurs at the end, and fire is a prefigurative image in a number of various guises: for instance, Gilles Hector remembers, as a child, his father Jean playfully saying 'You're red hot!' ('Tu brûles!') when he was very close to objects he'd hidden; and the narrator Gilles admits that he's playing with fire by becoming the love slave of the capricious Mayliss de Carlo. But there's twist at the end.

Baisers de cinéma is an unconventional love story, but also a detective story reminiscent of Patrick Modiano's work, where the narrator liberally punctuates the novel with references to locations in central Paris. Gilles owes his existence to a 'cinema kiss' between his cinema photographer father and his unknown mother and tries to cast light on who she was, watching numerous movies as part of this search – the nouvelle vague cinema plays an important part in the narrative. It's during one such movie visit that he meets the married Mayliss, and they become lovers, consumed by a very powerful passion.

And guess what? Yes, there are no English translations of Éric Fottorino's novels.