Set in that fraught period between the German occupation of France during World War II and the liberation which came much later, Patrick Modiano’s second novel, written in 1969, when he was just twenty-three years old, incorporates as his main character a young man who is at a total loss about what to do with his life. Describing himself as someone who “started out a pure and innocent soul,” he admits that his “innocence got lost along the way.” The people who have gravitated toward him now are former policemen and criminals, including an official now known as the Khedive, who have opened a “detective agency” from which they are collecting protection money. The Khedive, who still has important contacts throughout the police department, has high hopes himself of eventually becoming “Monsieur le Prefet de Police.” The young man known only as “Swing Troubadour,” does dirty work for this group, sometimes referred to as The Night Watch, earning a huge salary in the process. Possessing a warrant card and a gun license, the young man is ordered to infiltrate a “ring” of enemies and destroy it.
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When Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2014, only a few of his many books were available in English. Publishers quickly answered the call, and now most of his books are available to English speakers. One of the most recent to be translated is Modiano’s first novel, published when he was twenty-two, LA PLACE de L’ETOILE, a novel which explodes with the pent-up creative energy of an immature but highly sensitive young man. Among other things, he dreams of becoming a teacher and claims that he is six feet, six inches tall. He also claims that he has been put in charge of the procurement (and kidnapping) of high class women to work in the sex trade and that that he has been a longtime lover of Eva Braun, traveling the world – to Poland, Vienna, Istanbul, Egypt, and Palestine – laundering counterfeit money and trafficking in gold. Filled with the kind of imagination which young writers delight in exploring, this is one of the wildest debut novels I’ve ever read, filled with his personal fantasies and an enduring sense of irony and humor.
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Most of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s novels echo with memories of his own early life and his efforts to come to terms with his parents’ virtual abandonment of him before he was even in his teens. This novel is different, however, unique, a stand-alone. Main character Jean is sensitive, observant, and emotionally free to love, as the main characters appear to be in most of Modiano’s other novels, but in this novel, the main character does not feel like a substitute for the author. Instead, Jean is a young, rather naïve young man, caught in circumstances that he regards as more of a mystery than the serious crime that readers may conclude it to be, a conundrum which he does not fully grasp. Jean is almost certainly a pawn in the hands of clever criminals, rather than the victim of childhood traumas which typify Modiano’s main characters in his other novels. The mystery here may even include murder. Flashbacks, reminiscences, and overlaps between the events from the past and events in the present take place as Jean and the reader are forced to consider what really happened, especially when some of the earlier characters suddenly reappear in the present.
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Patrick Modiano establishes the tone and many of the themes for this often dream-like collection of interconnected stories, filled with mysteries and riddles, by setting the story at a school much like the one he himself attended. Nobel Prize-winner Modiano also saw almost nothing of either of his parents from the time he was a child until he was in his early twenties, when he went out on his own. His father, a smuggler of food and weapons from Africa and South America to the French Gestapo in Nazi-occupied France, had made a fortune, and his mother, an actress often out of the country, had no time for her son, leaving them to be brought up with no sense of home by surrogates – at one point a group of circus acrobats who lived near a falling-down chateau. Modiano has spent his life since then recreating his early life in his novels and raising questions about it, including details from many aspects of his life. This is the first of his novels that I have seen which concentrates on his time at an elite boys’ boarding school, a school in which most of the other boys were also on their own, isolated from their busy parents and prevented from growing up in a home of love and attention. Overlapping stories of ten alums show the results of their schooling as time passes, and many of them are as lost and purposeless as adults as they were as teenagers. Memory and identity and its connection to these formative years become major themes.
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In one of the wildest, most creative, and surprising literary novels of the year, French author Camille Laurens plays with reality and virtual reality on all levels and involves the engaged reader in the action as it occurs. The novel opens with a mysterious two-page Prologue, written in stream-of-consciousness style, a deposition from the Police Headquarters archives of a city in France, by a woman claiming to be an academic with a background in women’s issues and history. Her stream of consciousness raving has no context for the reader just beginning the novel (though it makes sense when re-read after the conclusion). The opening chapters of the book, not in stream of consciousness, begin with interviews between Claire Millecam and Dr. Marc B., as she reveals her academic background and her experience in the theatre. Though Dr. Marc B. is new to her, she has been “here” for two and a half years, and she, now almost fifty, tells him that “it’s his job to resuscitate me to rewire my circuits.” The doctor wants her to talk about “Christophe, the corpus delicti or rather the corpus so delectable he broke my heart.” She made Chris her Facebook Friend because he was the roommate of her former lover with whom she thinks she is still in love. Soon, however, she is falling in love with Chris and he with the persona of the 24-year-old girl whose photo she posted online. The reader is soon involved in a complex play of various types of reality: the reader’s reality; the reality of the main character, Claire; the reality of the action as it unfolds, and the virtual reality of Facebook. Surprises galore as the author involves the reader in drawing conclusions.
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