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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Famous for grand novels in which his characters try to digest what is happening around them while important world events unfold over an extended time frame, William Boyd has become a master of the genre, creating main characters who feel real as they and their families deal with the traumas they face over a long period of time, coming to new recognitions about life and themselves. In this new novel, William Boyd “breaks the rules,” taking the point of view of an ambitious woman who becomes a photographer the moment her father gives her a Kodak Brownie No. 2 for her seventh birthday in 1915. Avoiding the usual traps of a man writing as a woman, Boyd creates a fine portrait of Amory Clay, a woman who defies the usual limitations placed on women in British society during the early and mid-twentieth century, showing her life as she travels to political hot spots; records major and minor events in the years after World War I, through World War II, postwar France, and Vietnam. She also associates with the aristocracy, literary lights, and artists and creates her own rules regarding her love life – and just about everything else. Neither beautiful nor brilliant, Amory relies on her own insights, talent, and sense of adventure to reveal hidden worlds through photography, not in the dramatic sense of revealing the horrors of battle and its destruction, but through those moments in the midst of crises in which people reveal their humanity and connect with others, including the reader. Numerous vintage photographs add to the atmosphere and characterization.
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“On a Sunday evening, I went with some colleagues to an auction of contraband memorabilia in a karaoke bar in Little Havana…I had no intention of blowing my check, but, without the least warning, the god of tiny details set paradise before me…Right there, in the depth of the Sunday solitude of a Little Havana auction I found them: my new teeth…the sacred teeth of none other than [Hollywood diva] Marilyn Monroe…slightly yellowed.”—Gustavo Sanchez Sanchez, or “Highway.”
If that quotation does not pique your curiosity with its absurdity, the succeeding images may. As soon as Highway returns from Cuba to Mexico, he contacts the “best cosmetic dental clinic” in Mexico City and has “each of the teeth belonging to the Venus of the big screen transplanted into [his] mouth,” though he does save ten of his old teeth, the best-looking ones, for later, “just in case.” For months afterward, he walks around Mexico City smiling at his appearance in reflections, celebrating his good luck, and believing that “[his] life was a poem.” And this is just the beginning of a serious look at the connections between life, art, and literature.
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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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Norwegian author Per Petterson dedicates the ten short stories of Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes (1987) to his own father in his first published book, creating a lovely and loving portrait of a father, his young son, and a few other members of their family as they go about their everyday lives in 1960s Sweden. Main character Arvid, who will go on to star in some later books by Petterson, is six years old in the collection’s opening story, growing to the age of ten by its conclusion, a hypersensitive child who notices and cares about the family around him even as he is also aware of how much he depends on them. Arvid’s unique point of view, his life, and his reactions to events in these stories, though perhaps more emotional than what most other children his age experience, are nevertheless so plausible and filled with heart that one cannot help believing that many of the happenings here were real and that the stories are somewhat autobiographical. Seeming to breathe on their own, they need very little exposition to work their magic and draw in the reader, to whom they feel somehow familiar, no matter how the time, setting, and action may differ from our own. A very small book, with very short stories, Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes carries a disproportionately large impact, a debut which clearly presages the enormous success this author would eventually have in the literary world.
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