A short novel by a French Nobel Laureate.
A list of other winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature can be found here.
A private investigator leaves work when his boss retires, to dedicate himself to tracking down his own past, which he has forgotten because of amnesia.
It's a great book for two reasons: one is the way the investigator assembles truth, the second is the way the novel explores identity.
The concept which enables the author to create a sort of Noir mystery novel. The PI follows clues to track down people who might have known him in the past, although they often say they don't recognise him, or if they do, they give ambiguous or conflicting testimonies. He uses photographs, government records and eyewitness accounts to try and piece together a coherent narrative for himself. But is he joining the jigsaw pieces together correctly? “Until now everything has seemed so chaotic, so fragmented ... Scraps, shreds have come to light as a result of my searches ... But then that is perhaps what a life amounts to ...” (Ch 40) he asks himself, and then immediately worries: “Is it really my life I'm tracking down? Or someone else's into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?” (Ch 40) That's a question that I, as reader, had been asking for some time.
When he finally begins to remember - at which point the memories arrive with startling clarity, so vivid that they might almost be illusory reconstructions, just like a fiction itself - he remembers himself trying to escape France during the Nazi occupation of World War Two.
This allows Modiano to explore the idea that one's identity depends on one's memories, and one's memories can be fuzzy, imprecise and equivocal if not downright false. He repeatedly returns to an image of evanescent vapour, from the very start to the finish:
- “I am nothing. Nothing but a pale shape, silhouetted that evening against the cafe terrace, waiting for the rain to stop.” (first lines)
- “Strange people. the kind that leave the nearest blur behind them, soon vanished. Hutte and I often used to talk about these traceless beings. They spring up out of nothing one fine day and return there, having sparkled a little. Beauty queens. Gigolos. Butterflies. Most of them, even when alive, had no more substance than steam which will never condense.” (Ch 8)
- “We were gradually becoming invisible. Even our town clothes ... melted into this fog. Who knows? Perhaps we would end up evaporating altogether. Or we would merge with the mist which covered the windows, this stubborn mist you could not wipe off.” (Ch 37)
- “A little girl is returning from the beach, at dusk, with her mother. She is crying for no reason at all, because she would have liked to continue playing. She has already turned the corner of the street, and do not our life dissolve into the evening as quickly as this grief of Childhood?” (last lines)
- “A veranda which overlooked a pond. To the left, a small hump-back bridge, in the Chinese style, led to another bungalow, on the other side of the pond. The French windows were brilliantly lit up and I could seek couples moving behind them. They were dancing. Snatches of music reached us.” (Ch 2)
- “Everything about him was round. His face, his blue eyes and even the thin moustache, cut in an arc. His mouth too, and his plump and dimpled hands. He made me think of those balloons children hold on a string and which they sometimes release to see how high they will climb.” (Ch 7)
- “No furniture, except for an old divan, covered in worn red velvet upholstery on which we sat. He took a pipe from his pocket and lit it calmly. The stained glass windows gave the daylight that filtered through a pale blue tint.” (Ch 11)
- “We were standing before a lawn like the one I had tried to cross to reach the chateau, but here, the grass was not nearly so high. To my astonishment, the back of the chateau did not conform at all with its facade: it was built of gray stone. The roof was not the same either: on this side it was more elaborate, with cut off corners and gables, so that a house which at first sight looked like a Louis XIII chateau, from the back looked like one of those late-nineteenth-century seaside resort mansions.” (Ch 11)
- “The cigarette and pipe smoke irritated my eyes and made me cough a little. There was a smell of lard in the air.” (Ch 17)
- “He stared as though the light of a projector had been turned on his face.” (Ch 7)
- “The Eiffel Tower generally so reassuring, looked like a hulk of oxidized scrap-iron.” (Ch 7)
- “In the end, we were all ‘beach men’ and that ‘the sand’ ... ‘keeps the traces of our footsteps only a few moments’.” (Ch 8)
- “I've just returned from the Golden Tripe Competition ... I was one of the judges. We had to swallow a hundred and seventy pieces of tripe over a period of one half days” (Ch 10)
First published in French as Rue des Boutiques Obscures in 1978 by Editions Gallimard
My English translation by Daniel Weissbort was first published by Jonathan Cape in 1980. I read the Penguin paperback version of this which was issued in 2019.
This review was written by
the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling
and The Kids of God
Other novels by Modiano reviewed in this blog:
