Suspended Sentences (1988), by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti

 

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.

Paris Nocturne (2003), by Patrick Modiano, translated by Phoebe Weston-Evans

 

The original French title of Paris Nocturne is Accident nocturne, which, for me, puts a slightly different focus on the book.  Life is a series of accidental events, and in this pensive account, the unnamed narrator is looking back on an accident that he had at some unspecified time a long time ago when he was about to turn twenty-one.  This accident, and other accidental events that swirl around it, has been preying on his mind for a long time...

The book would have put me in mind of Suspended Sentences even if I hadn't known they were by the same author.  There is the same dreamy quality, that same sense of an ill-defined menace, the same hint of an oppressive presence, the same half-light and mistiness that veils the night, and that same sense of confusion that inhibits action.  And the same elusive people and places that the narrator does not and cannot ever know.

All of us, when we look back over our lives, have vague and unreliable memories of people, places and incidents, but how much more intense this fog of memory must be when the long ago was peopled by an occupying force of great menace and the shadowy figures of the Resistance.  A young adult alert to new experiences and encounters would find childhood reliabilities shattered, and be overwhelmed by huge numbers of strangers bringing menace, be made uneasy by a new order that upsets old certainties, and be confused by familiar adults no longer in charge of their own destiny... And to some extent these uncertainties also permeate the lives of the next generation, in the way that my young life was shaped in part by what my parents experienced as young adults during the war.

Patrick Modiano (b.1945) was awarded the Nobel Prize for work which evokes the most ungraspable human destinies and often explores the Nazi Occupation, an event which still lingers in Parisian memory today.  Even though this novella is set no further back in time than the 1960s, when his character is almost 21, there are still allusions which hint at the shadow of the Occupation.  The accident which sends him on the trail of the mysterious woman in the car jolts him into a new reality, one which he thinks will resolve many issues which have been troubling him.

The moment when the new reality arrives for the narrator begins with a car accident, which takes place at the Place des Pyramides (named for the Battle of the Pyramids in Egypt, a great French victory under Napoleon) as the narrator makes his way to the ironically-named Place de la Concorde which was the site where Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793 along with many others including Marie Antoinette.

Originally named Place Louis XV in 1755, the site was then rebadged as Place de la Révolution, renamed Place de la Concorde as a gesture of reconciliation in 1795, only to have the name Place Louis XV / Place Louis XVI restored under the Bourbons, and finally back to Place de la Concorde in 1830 after the July Revolution.  So the narrator is brought to his knees at the site representing France's military power, and is suspended on his way to the site that represents the foundation of French democracy, in a quiet allusion to the suspension of Liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity) under the Occupation.

I was crossing Place des Pyramides on my way to Place de la Concorde when a car appeared suddenly out of the darkness.  At first I thought it had just grazed me, then I felt a sharp pain from my ankle to my knee.  I fell onto the pavement.  But I managed to get up again.  The car swerved and collided with one of the arcades surrounding the square in a shower of broken glass.  (p. 1)

From this moment, the novel traces the narrator's attempts to make sense of unreliable memory.  When he comes round from anaesthesia at the Mirabeau Hospital afterwards, the female driver has vanished and a thuggish man makes him sign a waiver, leaving a wad of banknotes behind and an admonition that it would be a good idea to forget all about it.   The 'report' that this man leaves behind makes no mention of the clinic and refers instead to a hotel's casualty department.  Clearly something odd is going on and the narrator mounts a search for the driver, whose name is Jacqueline Beausergent.

But this search is tied up also with his vague memories of other events in his life.  He has unfinished business with his estranged father involved in something shady, and there was a woman who ran over his dog.  He believes that encounters such as this have some meaning:

I had read that only a small numbers of encounters are the product of chance.  The same circumstances, the same faces keep coming back, like the pieces of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope, with the play of mirrors giving the illusion that the combinations are infinitely variable.  But in fact the combinations are rather limited.  (p. 21)

He acknowledges, however, that there was a kind of wilful amnesia in his relationships:

Before the accident, I'd been living for almost a year in Hôtel de la Rue de la Voie-Verte, near Porte d'Orléans.  For a long time, I wanted to forget this period of my life, or else remember only the seemingly insignificant details.

He offers glimpses of a man returning from work, and a chance meeting in a café with a travel agent that he had thought was a student...

They were always to do with people I'd come across, barely glimpsed, and who would remain as mysteries in my mind.

Like the narrator in 'Afterimage' who is haunted by tantalising image-memories of people whose identity he does not and cannot ever know, the narrator in Paris Nocturne tries to catalogue these glimpses:

I even started compiling a list, with approximate dates, of all these lost faces and places, of all those abandoned projects, like the time I tried to enrol at the faculty of medicine, but I didn't see it through.  My attempts to catalogue all those plans which never saw the light of day and which remained forever on hold, a way of searching for a breach, for vanishing points.  Because I'm reaching the age at which, little by little, life begins to close in on itself. (p.24)

This endless struggle to make sense of the past is something that bothers all of us, at both the personal and the public level.  Modiano make no pretence to resolve it, not even when his narrator meets up with the elusive Jacqueline.  Much as he wants to be comforted by her banal friendliness, in the end it only arouses more suspicion, but when he tells her that he thinks she's hiding something, her reply is abrupt: she says she has nothing to hide and that Life is far simpler than you think.'

Is it?  The answer seems to be that it's not.

Author: Patrick Modiano
Title: Paris Nocturne first published as Accident nocturne by Éditions Gallimard in 2003
Translated by Phoebe Weston- Evans
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company, 2015
ISBN: 9781925240108
Review copy courtesy of Text 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

 

 

 

 

Little Jewel (2001), by Patrick Modiano, translated by Penny Hueston

 

It's not long since I read Paris Nocturne (Accident nocturne, 2003) but I think it's best to read Patrick Modiano's Little Jewel (La Petite Bijou, 2001) as a companion piece.  The books share common themes and a similar sense of angst, and while I wouldn't suggest reading them one straight after the other, it's easy to recognise the parallels that occur in the characterisation if you don't leave it too long.

'Little Jewel' was the stage name of the narrator, Thérèse, a young girl abandoned as a child by her parents and all alone in Paris.  She ekes out a living by baby-siting a child as unwanted as she was herself, and drifts aimlessly in a city which is indifferent to her.  But one day she sees a woman in a yellow coat - a woman that she thinks might be her mother, even though she has been told that her mother died in Morocco twelve years ago.  This sighting provokes a stream of memories and a surge of fears that cripple her already fragile sense of self.

Like the unnamed narrator in Paris Nocturne, Thérèse is preoccupied by the past, and the novella has the same textural qualities as Suspended Sentences too.  To quote from my last review where I noted the similarities:

 There is the same dreamy quality, that same sense of an ill-defined menace, the same hint of an oppressive presence, the same half-light and mistiness that veils the night, and that same sense of confusion that inhibits action.  And the same elusive people and places that the narrator does not and cannot ever know.

Thérèse never knew her father, and has only disconnected memories of her mother.  She has vague memories of the places where she lived and went to school in her childhood, and she latches onto what she does know in order to try to resurrect the past in a meaningful way.  She's not even really sure of her mother's name because she seems to have had reasons to change it.   One of the most poignant scenes in the story comes when Thérèse is co-opted to appear in a film alongside her mother: 

I had to lie on a bed, then sit up and say, 'I'm scared.'  It was as simple as that.  Another day, I had to keep lying on the bed and flip through a photo album.  Then my mother came into the bedroom, wearing a diaphanous blue dress - the same dress she was wearing when she left the apartment on the evening after losing the dog.  She sat on the bed and looked at me with big sad eyes.  Then she caressed my cheek and leaned over to kiss me; I remember we had to do it several times.  In everyday life, she never showed the slightest bit of affection' (p.124)

The paralysis of action that grips Thérèse stems from fear.  Fear of being alone, fear of crowds on the Metro, fear of being deserted again.  Fear of the live grenades that are said to be still in this post-war period, in the Fossombronne-la-Fôret. And sadly, although she has never seen this film in which her mother showed her the affection that she never showed in real life, she also fears that the film will deteriorate and then there will never be any proof that they were once together.

There are kindly characters who express concern for Thérèse - a translator at a radio station and a pharmacist - but her introspective manner and habit of telling lies makes this needy young woman hard to help.  When the pharmacist takes the girl under her wing, Thérèse betrays this woman's motherly kindness because she fears connection as much as she fears loneliness.  What Modiano seems to be saying is that without remembrance, a quest for identity is doomed to fail.

Author: Patrick Modiano
Title: Little Jewel (La Petite Bijou)
Translated by Penny Hueston
Publisher: Text Publishing, 2015
ISBN: 9781925240115
Review copy courtesy of Text. 

© Lisa Hill

Cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers where you can join in a conversation about the book if you want to.

La Place de l'Étoile by Patrick Modiano

(French Title: La Place de l'Étoile) - 1968


Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read


An interesting book, certainly a challenging book. The author was quite young, only 23 years old, when he wrote this, his first book that led eventually to him receiving the Nobel Price for Literature.

Patrick Modiano starts with a little story which could be called a joke if it wasn't so sad:

"In June 1942, a German officer approaches a young man and says: 'Excuse me, monsieur, where is the Place de l’Etoile?' The young man points to the left side of his chest. - A Jewish History". The young man is, of course, alluding to the star of David that was required to be worn by all Jews rather than the famous place in Paris.

Then he carries on talking about his protagonist, Raphaël Schlemilovitch and his way of surviving or not surviving the holocaust. It took me a while to realize what he was doing. He is living the lives of many and has an almost magic realistic but certainly an immensely sarcastic style in describing this. We meet many famous Jews and non-Jews who have made history both past and present in his stories.

I don't know whether this is the main book why the author was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and whether this is a typical novel by him but I certainly would not classify it as an "easy read". Still, if you are interested in this history, you might enjoy it.

From the back cover:

"The first novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014, which with The Night Watch and Ring Roads forms a trilogy of the Occupation.

This astonishing first novel by one of France's greatest living writers was among the earliest to seriously question both wartime collaboration in France and the myths of the Gaullist era. The epigraph reads:

In June 1942 a German officer goes up to a young man and says: 'Excuse me, monsieur, where is La Place de l'Étoile?' The young man points to the star on his chest.

The narrator of this wild and whirling satire is a hero on the edge, who imagines himself in Paris under the German Occupation. Through his mind stream a thousand different possible existences, where sometimes the Jew is king, sometimes a martyr, and where tragedy disguises itself as farce. Real and fictional characters from Maurice Sachs and Drieu La Rochelle, Marcel Proust and the French Gestapo, Captain Dreyfus and the Petainist admirals, to Freud, Hitler and Eva Braun spin past our eyes. But at the centre of this whirligig is La Place de l'Étoile, the geographical and moral centre of Paris, the capital of grief.

With La Place de l'Étoile Patrick Modiano burst onto the Parisian literary scene in 1968, winning two literary prizes, and preparing the way for the next two books - The Night Watch and Ring Roads - in what is regarded as his trilogy of the Occupation."

Patrick Modiano received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014 "for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation".

Read my other reviews of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature.  

Original Post on "Let's Read".

So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood by Patrick Modiano

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

The workings of the mind are mysterious and our memory isn’t always very reliable, especially about childhood. Some people recall their early years vividly and in great detail, while others seem to remember hardly anything. Moreover, the bits and pieces that have lasted in our minds for many years often turn out to be shockingly incomplete, blurred or even alienated past the recognition of others who were present too. Some memories are so painful that they are downright repressed: access denied until… This is the experience that an ageing novelist makes in So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood by Patrick Modiano, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2014. When a man steps into his life to return his lost address book, he rouses the ghosts of childhood asking after a person whose long outdated number is in it. 

Patrick Modiano was born in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, in July 1945. His mother being an actress often on tour, he passed his early years in the care of his maternal grandparents who brought him up speaking Flemsh. Soon after high school he turned to writing and published his first work, an article for the magazine Le Crapouillot, in 1966. The following year he made his debut as a novelist with La Place de l'Étoile which earned him national as well as international awards. A great number of novels followed, most notable among them Ring Roads (Les Boulevards de ceinture: 1972), Missing Person (Rue des Boutiques obscures: 1978), Dora Bruder (1997; also translated as The Search Warrant: Dora Bruder), Pedigree (Un pedigree: 2005), and In the Café of Lost Youth (Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue: 2007). In 2014 Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation”. The author’s latest published work is So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood (Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier: 2014). Patrick Modiano lives in Paris, France.

A phone call that the ageing novelist Jean Daragane receives in his apartment in Paris on an unusually hot afternoon in September opens the story of So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood. The man on the phone found the writer’s address book and offers to take it directly to him since he is nearby, but there’s something in the man’s voice that makes Daragane feel uncomfortable about him. Nonetheless he agrees to meet him in a café the next day. The obscure stranger in his forties arrives in the company of an enigmatic  woman dressed all in black and introduces himself as Gilles Ottolini. After handing the address book to Daragane he asks him about a person whose name and phone number he found in it, a certain Guy Torstel. The name doesn’t ring a bell with the author, though. Only then Ottolini reveals that he is gathering information about an old affair from the local news in which Guy Torstel was somehow involved and about which he wants to write an article. Daragane can’t help him. Already the next morning Ottolini calls the author again, asks him to meet him after his return from a business trip and reminds him that he used the name Guy Torstel in his first novel. It’s no use. He doesn’t remember the man. Later the same day Daragane receives another phone call, this time from Ottolini’s friend who asks him to come to her apartment. She gives him the material that her friend compiled doing research for a book which he hopes Daragane will help him to write. Reading the file, Daragane is pushed back into his own childhood in the early 1950s and gradually he realises that something happened to him at the time that he needs to remember…

In his third-person novella So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood the author uses his own tragic experience of having had a mother who was mostly absent and left him in the care of others to create an entirely credible protagonist who passed almost his whole life pushing away his past. When Gilles Ottoloni appears, Jean Daragane has reached a state of complete emotional detachment from everything – his childhood, his books, human relations, and life altogether. Like in reality something as unimportant as a long forgotten name in his address book suffices, though, to bring back the ghosts of his past and to urge him to investigate his own childhood almost as if it were that of a stranger. Through incoherent flashbacks, extracts from police files and the protagonist's own enquiries Patrick Modiano unveils gradually and with great skill the disturbing truth that made Daragane forget everything that was and without regret. However, retrieving his past doesn't make it any more real to him. I read the book in its original French version and found it easy to follow because the language is unpretentious, clear and precise. The slim volume is also a quick read. I enjoyed it immensely.

When I picked So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood by Patrick Modiano, I wasn't quite sure if I would like it because the works of Nobel Prize laureates aren't necessarily very accessible or at least good quality reads. Besides, I had never heard of the author before October 2014. Luckily, I didn't allow my doubts to keep me from reading one of his books! It was a good experience and I'm sure that this novella won't remain his only work in my library. And it goes without saying that I highly recommend this one for reading.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:

http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2015/12/so-you-dont-get-lost-in-the-neighbourhood-by-patrick-modiano.html

Modiano, Patrick "Catherine Certitude"

You know that something special is coming your way when you start noting down & highlighting quotable lines on page one of a new book. Catherine Certitude was one of those books.

The story begins in New York.

Catherine is an elderly woman watching her daughter teach a dance class. She notices a young girl wearing glasses. The young girl carefully places her glasses on the chair to dance. Instantly, Catherine is transported back to her own glasses-wearing childhood.

Without my glasses, the world lost its roughness and became as soft and downy as the big pillow I used to lean my cheek against before going to sleep.

When I wore my glasses I saw the world as it was. I couldn’t dream any more. 

I loved how this one paragraph told me that this was going to be a book about perception & memory – my favourite bookish themes.

Catherine Certitude is by the Nobel Prize in Literature 2014 winner, Patrick Modiano. It was first published in 1988 in France. This lovely hardback edition, translated by William Rodarmor & illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé was recently published in the UK through Andersen Press.

Sempé was a well-known French cartoonist. He created covers for The New Yorker over many decades and worked with René Goscinny on the children’s series Le Petit Nicolas.

It’s a curious tale with more adult appeal I feel, than the young reader picture book that it looks like from the outside. The cover declares that it’s a love letter to Paris, but it feels more like a loving homage to a father/daughter relationship. Full of tenderness & nuances, Catherine Certitude highlights all the special little understandings that exist in any strong bond.

Catherine now runs a ballet school in New York, but this is the story of her childhood in Paris:

Only one thing in my life is out of the ordinary: before we came to America, I spent my childhood in Paris, in a neighbourhood off the 10th arrondissement.

One of the few things I knew about Modiano from all the publicity last year was that he had had a difficult childhood and that his stories were concerned with memory, history, identity and the complexities of choice.

I was therefore, even more curious about Catherine’s story – was this a wish fulfillment tale about his own childhood or perhaps a story about his relationship with his two daughters?

Modiano’s work is haunted by what he says was a cold upbringing, creating the impression of a long letter to his parents. (The Local)

Catherine Certitude leaves us with many unsolved mysteries. Why did the mother leave them in Paris? What were Mr Certitude’s shady dealings? Why did he emigrate to France?

There are all sorts of signposts from Modiano’s own life – the cold, unavailable mother and a father engaged in dodgy collaborations. Yet, it is clear that this father and daughter are very close. Tolerant and supportive of each other’s dreams and foibles:

We always stay the same and the people we have been in the past go on living until the end of time.

Catherine Certitude is Modiano’s only children’s book, but I for one, will be reading more of his adult work to explore his “art of memory” (Nobel Prize committee).

• Originally posted by Brona @This Reading Life