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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Like so many others who read voraciously – all kinds of books, from experimental modern fiction to the classics, from thoughtful novels of ideas to thrillers, and from analytical non-fiction to other-worldly fantasy – I have often been asked to name my favorite author, as if it were possible to choose just one. And as Lloyd Alexander points out above, I tend to read according to mood and what appeals at different stages of my life. My all-time favorite books, however, tend to be those which deal with ideas in a unique way, capturing my imagination at the same time that they convey a new slant on a universal theme. If they are also written with a touch of humor, so much the better. Among my long-time, special favorites are several authors who are little known in the United States, authors whose unique work has continually entertained and surprised me, often moving me to tears at the same time that it has left me with a smile on my face. One such author is Australian author Elizabeth Jolley (1923 – 2007). Simultaneously daring and subtle, insightful and bold, sensitive and sometimes sexy Jolley’s novels are absorbing and satisfying on many levels, and I hope I’ll persuade a few who are unfamiliar with her to take a look at her novels.
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With a title which recalls a children’s game which is used to make choices, Rock, Paper, Scissors is filled with the interactions of people who have faced hard times and have somehow survived. The novel opens with Thomas and his sister Jenny dealing with the death of their father in a jail cell where he has been awaiting trial on some unknown charge which will bring a long jail sentence. When they later go to their father’s apartment, neither of them wants anything as a memento, but Jenny decides to take his toaster, simply because hers is broken and she has very little money to buy a new one. Later, when the toaster does not work, Thomas takes it apart for her and finds something surprising inside. Throughout these beginning pages, the novel moves back and forth in time as Thomas, forced to think about his estranged father, obsesses about death – that of his father, of family members, and even of the unknown people he sees in the supermarket – and it is through this introspection that many of the details about his family background are revealed. As compelling as the plot and Thomas’s psychology may be, the novel’s philosophical underpinnings and the universal themes which emerge from the conflicts are even more provocative. Filled with smart, crisp language; carefully described and introduced imagery; and occasionally lyrical passages, the novel owes much of its appeal in English to translator K. E. Semmel. With contrasting themes of life and death, love and hate, accident and design, strength and weakness, selfishness and altruism, and reality and invention, the novel offers much to ponder on many levels.
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Famous for his hilariously ironic comic sketches in Beyond the Fringe (1960), with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Peter Cook, and Talking Heads (1992); for his recent Tony Award-winning play The History Boys (2004), among other productions; and, most recently, his satiric novel (2007), An Uncommon Reader, about Queen Elizabeth’s discovery of a new kind of reading, Alan Bennett in this 1989 novella gives insights into his own life and personality. In The Lady in the Van, he details the relationship he had with someone who, under any other circumstances, would be considered a homeless person. In this case, Mary Shepherd is not really “homeless” because she lives, unkempt and unfettered, in a dilapidated van, painted yellow, “the papal color,” which she has parked illegally in various places throughout Bennett’s neighborhood. When she runs afoul of the parking regulations while her van is on a lot across the street from Bennett’s own house, Bennett offers to let her park the van temporarily in the garden entrance to his house. She stays for the next fifteen years, a woman so difficult that Bennett admits “one seldom was able to do her a good turn without thoughts of strangulation.”
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