The most recently translated work of the 2014 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature will present itself to many readers as a coded text. Patrick Modiano’s Suspended Sentences, rushed into print by Yale University Press, is made up of three novella-length prose pieces, published in French between 1988 and 1993. The foreignness of their subject matter is signaled by the epigraphs chosen by the author for two stories, which are by Paul Eluard and Lamartine, French poets who may strike a chord in their home culture but will be mysterious to North American readers.
Modiano’s supple, sinuous prose opens a view of lost Paris neighbourhoods and the lives once led in them. If a reader has had the unusual fortune to inhabit the down-at-heels quartiers, fraying edges and docklands of the city after World War II or, through avid watching of the films of Francois Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard, is familiar with the look and feel of the mid-60s black and white version of the city, Modiano will feel familiar.
For most readers, the author’s finely crafted stories will offer exotic urban geographies, full of suggestive and mysterious detail: “That Sunday evening in November, I was on Rue de l’Abbé-de-l’Epée. I was skirting the high wall around the Institut des Sourds-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas. I could still recall a café at the corner of Rue Saint-Jacques, where I used to go after taking in a film at the Studio des Ursulines.”
This is the opening to Modiano’s Flowers of Ruin, a complex, noirish investigation of a young couple’s death. Modiano comes to the detective story by way of its early American practitioner, Edgar Allan Poe, whose stories of detection and the grotesque the French have long loved. Poe’s voice informs the narrator’s as he tells us “a very strange story that occurred that night in the building at number 26 Rue des Fossés-Saint-Jacques, near the Pantheon, in the home of Mr. and Mme T.”
Modiano is in love with the genres of his youth, with pulp novels and the new wave movies that portrayed wayward French men and women rambling and driving about the streets of Paris in big American convertibles. The collection’s title story provides a compendium of postwar French cultural shifts – increasing American influence, new ways for women to dress (often like men), the overall sense of a society adrift – as characters turn to the pat wisdom found in Raymond Chandler novels. A crocodile cigarette case is handed over with the bromide “It’ll come in handy later on”; two brothers who are taken care of by a mysterious group of women are told by a visitor “You should read pulps.”
As he leads the reader through the twists and turns of Flowers of Ruin, Modiano directs us to the films best suited to capturing the “limpid light” he associates with a key setting in the tale. These, he tells us, are the early ’60s works Lola and Adieu Philippine
Modiano’s stories do not employ this kind of detail simply for historical colour, nor do they resort to the more recent tendency to drop brand names in the pursuit of hipness. Recovery of memory by way of the reference to the look and impact of a particular film follows from Modiano’s effort to create a shuttling relationship between past and present.
His narrators pursue past experience, lost faces and feelings on streets that have become almost unrecognizable with the passage of time. Yet at particular moments, details of light or weather or the appearance of a stray figure transport a scene through the fog to another time. In this way, “the light of the early sixties” shows itself at one moment, and it seems “that the years had become conflated and time transparent.”
One expects that it is this method, its philosophical and emotional impact, that interested the Nobel committee (surely it wasn’t Modiano’s boyhood memories of the pulps, or of girls dressed exotically, in blue jeans and leather jackets).
Reports of Modiano’s receipt of the Nobel Prize highlighted his writerly relationship to the Second World War and the German occupation of Paris. His Jewish father was detained by the French police, but was quickly released. In the stories included in Suspended Sentence, the occupation is a ghostly but recurrent narrative detail. It lurks as a clue in Flowers of Ruin, since one of the narrator’s memories of his father’s release from an “annex of the Drancy transit camp” leads him to consider a possible player in the death of the young Mr. and Mme. T. But neither the reason for the young couple’s deaths nor the facts underlying the occupation-era story become clear.
Modiano’s writerly method in relation to wartime events is better seen in his 1997 novel Dora Bruder, which appeared first in translation under its French title and then as Search Warrant. In a wartime era copy of Paris Soir, Modiano’s narrator encounters the following: “Paris. Missing, a young girl, Dora Bruder, age 15, height 1.55m, oval-shaped face, grey-brown eyes, grey sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy-blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes. Address all information to M and Mme Bruder, 41 Boulevard Ornano, Paris.”
The novel is a meditation on self, in light of the events of wartime, and on the kind of memory work that compels its author: “I can hardly believe that this is the city where Dora lived with her parents, where my father lived when he was 20 years younger than I am now. I feel as if I am alone in making the link between Paris then and Paris now, alone in remembering all these details. There are moments when the link is stretched to breaking-point, and other evenings when the city of yesterday appears to me in fugitive gleams behind that of today.”
This search after a lost girl is echoed in the stories of Suspended Sentences, where it is, instead, Paris of the postwar years and into the 1960s, whose “fugitive gleams” lead the reader on unlikely adventures. In this, Modiano is a detective of time, applying Poe’s methods of detection to far more pressing and troubling ends.
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