Suspended Sentences is a trio of linked novellas by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzetti and published by Yale University Press late in 2014. To the best of my knowledge it's the first of Modiano's work to be made available in English here in Australia; no doubt there will soon be more. I am very lucky to have been able to read this book so soon after it became available in Australia - my wonderful library got it in for me within a week of me asking for it to be purchased for their collection! Thank you, Kingston Library:)
One of my reading goals is to eventually read all the Nobel winners (the novelists, that is) and Modiano's win last year was especially interesting to me because of the citation:
"for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation" (Source: Wikipedia)
This is perhaps because the Surrender of the French, the Occupation and the accompanying pro-Nazi Vichy regime has always fascinated me, because it seems incomprehensible. The French experience is quite different to other countries over-run by the Germans and a marked contrast to their previous military and political history. I am intrigued by how they reconcile this shameful aspect of their past, and how/if it shapes contemporary attitudes and literature.
All countries seem to have some shameful events in their histories, and there are differences in how we deal with it. S.A. Jones, in her novel Isabelle of the Moon and Stars, (see my review) raises the issue of how Germany remembers the shameful history of the Holocaust compared to the Czech Republic. Here in Australia even the acknowledgement of the dispossession of the indigenous people is contentious, whereas New Zealand dealt with that issue more than a century ago with the Treaty of Waitangi. In the US the shame of slavery dominates over the shame of indigenous dispossession, and in the UK, the shame of colonisation is still shaping attitudes long after the end of Empire, if Anglo-Indian and Anglo-African literature is anything to go by.
Modiano's three novellas, shaped by shadowy memories of Occupation, exude a discomfited nostalgia for a world that no longer exists. Originally published separately, the stories form a cohesive whole through the narrator's voice and the presence of some recurring characters. All three are permeated by a sense of loss. The novellas are unmistakeably Parisian, but they are located in a Paris that is gone, a city which, in 'Flowers of Ruin' seems now to offer more to tourists than to its residents. Watching a tour bus, the narrator observes that
The Jardins de Luxembourg was just one stop and they had all of Paris to visit. I wanted to follow them on that glorious morning, that harbinger of spring, and be just a simple tourist. No doubt I would have rediscovered a city I had lost, and through its avenues, the feeling I'd once had of being light and carefree. (p.212-3)
He remembers the days preceding his departure from Paris for Vienna, and 'liberating' a small dog from its cage in a kennel in Avenue d'Italie.
I sat down with him at a sidewalk café table. It was June. They hadn't yet dug the foundations for the périphérique, which gives such a feeling of enclosure. Back then, the gates of Paris were all in vanishing perspectives; the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots. And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner. (p. 213)
(Though perhaps not quite the same, LOL, I can certainly relate to this feeling of entrapment by the périphérique). I have vivid memories of being stuck in it in peak hour when trying to return a hire car to the airport. We only just caught our flight in time despite having left the Loire Valley with hours to spare, which taught us a valuable lesson. Do not ever drive in Paris. Take the train!)
Modiano's underlay of old Paris also holds memories of elusive people. The narrator thinks he sees the false Pacheco leading the tour, a man with eyes that so were so blue they were empty. Pacheco haunts his recollections because he is tied up in some way with a double suicide that took place decades ago in 1933; people and events swirl around in the fog of his memory but nothing is resolved.
This is also true of the other two stories. In 'Afterimage', the un-named narrator reflects on his attempts to engage with the photographer Jansen. They had met in 1964 when aged 19, and he was enthralled by Jansen's photographs documenting a Parisian life that no longer existed, even then. He spends long hours cataloguing these carelessly stored photos because he thinks that Jansen, a student of Robert Capa, is a major artist and that the photos have historic value. But Jansen is indifferent to his own work, and abandons Paris for elsewhere, leaving the narrator with only a catalogue of photos that no longer exist and tantalising image-memories of people whose identity he does not and cannot ever know.
The sense of a mysterious unacknowledged past is even stronger in 'Suspended Sentences'. In this story the narrator remembers his childhood during the Occupation. It has, according to the brief introduction by Polizzotti, biographical correspondences with Modiano's own life, for both narrator and author were brought up in the absence of parents. In the novella, the narrator tries to make sense of strange events but his personal history remains opaque because all traces of the 'gang' that took care of him seems to have vanished. Were they crooks, or were they collaborators? He does not, and cannot ever know.
For many years Australians hid any trace of 'the convict stain' in their family history, and it seems that in France, as in Germany, there are also ominous silences and dead or misleading trails. I'll be interested to read more of Modiano's work, but next time, I want to read a full length novel.
Author: Patrick Modiano
Title: Suspended Sentences
Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti
Publisher: Yale University Press, 2014, first published in 1988
ISBN: 9780300198058
Source: Kingston Library
© Lisa Hill
Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.
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