Remembering and forgetting are the essence of French author Patrick Modiano’s writing as he creates almost dreamlike images and sequences which fade in and out as the time frame changes, often unexpectedly. New images and memories force themselves into his consciousness, only to vanish back into the netherworld from which they have come. Almost as famous for the bizarre and often cruel life he experienced as a child as he is for his Nobel Prize for Literature, Modiano, through his novels, mines his own past for clues as to who he was and who and what he has become. Repeating images and events combine with references to absent parents and circus people, some of whom engage in unlawful activities, to reinforce the idea that the only love and care Modiano knew as a child came from strangers. In this newly translated novel from 2003, Modiano depicts a main character, remarkably like himself, as a twenty-year-old walking late at night, when a car emerges from the darkness and grazes his leg from knee to ankle, then crashes. A woman stumbles out of the driver’s seat, and she and the speaker are ushered into a nearby hotel lobby to await a police van and medical help. From the outset, the circumstances of this accident are unclear. The flashbacks and flashforwards begin seemingly at random, as he recalls his father’s cruelty on the rare occasions he saw him and also meets a philosopher who runs classes for his student disciples. He meets a girl, a music teacher, then suddenly finds himself, thirty years later, overhearing a familiar name on the loudspeaker at Orly Airport, at which point he races to find the person. Time before and after the accident become confused, as the same or similar images and memories appear and reappear, and names in one time period reappear in another.
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Resembling a simple, straightforward mystery story set in France as it opens, this newest novel by Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano gradually becomes increasingly eerie, psychological, and autobiographical, though it never loses the basic structure which makes the mystery novel so popular. As the novel opens, Jean Daragane, a reclusive author, who has not seen anybody in three months, has just received a telephone call offering to return his lost address book if he will meet with the finder. Gilles Ottolini, an advertising man and former journalist who is researching a murder from forty years ago, has found and looked through Daragane’s address book and has been excited to see a listing there for Guy Torstel, someone whose name Daragane claims means nothing at all to him. The next day, however, Ottolini calls Daragane back, explaining that he has read Daragane’s first novel, and has discovered that Torstel is, in fact, a character in that book. Daragane, however, not only does not remember Torsel, but does not to remember anything at all about that book from many years ago. The two agree to meet, and the mysteries increase, as “insect bites” from the depth of Darragane’s memories slowly begin to pierce the “cellophane” which has protected Darragane from traumatic memories of his childhood.
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In a novel which ranges widely over almost three centuries of Russian history, author Andrei Makine, a Russian émigré who has lived in France since 1987, recreates the life of a young Russian author/filmmaker who finds that the concept of creativity in the world in which he lives must always bend to the will of someone else – the censors, a hired director, or the tastes of the public – if his work is to survive. In this metafictional novel Makine presents Oleg Erdmann as his author/main character, a man whose parents were originally from Germany. Oleg was born in Russia, but his father was unable to cope with the difficulties he faced as the head of an immigrant family in a country which did not admit him into its mainstream, and he spent most of his spare time escaping his personal problems by painstakingly creating a detailed model of a giant castle, elaborate and reminiscent of the castles from the eras of Peter the Great and his successors Whenever serious problems would arise in his daily life, his father would say, softly, “This is all happening to me because of that little German girl who became Catherine the Great.” Determined to write a screenplay about Catherine the Great years later, Oleg goes way beyond the limits of the usual biography, questioning not only Catherine’s life and her decisions but also the very nature of love and how one achieves it, using Catherine’s lengthy affairs with over a dozen men to expand the scope of his screenplay into a discussion of life, love, and art.
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In this unusual approach to memoir writing, Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano presents all aspects of his life from his earliest memories until he turns twenty-one, without embroidering them, without drawing conclusions about who he is as a result of them, and without moralizing, excusing, or apologizing. It is as complete a record of his life as he can apparently remember or resurrect from records, with numerous references to people and places that were important to him but that most American readers will not recognize. The result feels more like an objective research tool for students of Modiano’s work rather than what one finds in memoirs written by other, more loquacious, authors. Those who have read a novel like Suspended Sentences, for example, cannot help but believe that much, if not most, of that novel is autobiographical. Here in this memoir, however, Modiano gives only the basic outlines of the events at the heart of that novel, forcing the reader to conclude that the action in this and other novels has been embellished, developed, and described in ways which make for great fiction, whether or not it is completely true. An unusual view of the past and its memories.
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In this short but beautifully compressed novel about writing, memory, and the Holocaust, French author Deborah Levy-Bertherat tells the story of Helene Roche and her great-uncle Daniel Roche, previously known as Daniel Ascher, and now known as H. R. Sanders, author of the Black Insignia series of young adult adventure novels. Divided into three parts which take place between September 1999, and July 2000, the novel focuses on Helene’s efforts to come to terms with her relationship with this much older family member, even as she is, herself, writing her thesis for a degree at the Institute of Art and Archaeology at the University of Paris. Helene has recently moved into a nearby garret apartment which her great-uncle has offered in an apartment building he owns nearby while he is off on one of his many travels. Not close to her uncle, she lives with her boyfriend Guillaume, a fellow student and a huge fan of the Black Insignia series of adventure novels which her great-uncle has written over the years. Ultimately, the reader stands in awe of the depiction of the creative process which the author presents, along with its responsibilities – and its inevitabilities. The true writer and committed chronicler of the past, wrapped in the atmosphere of another time, has no alternative but to follow his/her muse into the scenes and stories which have animated his/her own life, and as Levy-Bertherat shows here, relive and perhaps revise his/her own history in the process.
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