| Title | : | Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0300198051 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780300198058 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 213 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1988 |
Shadowed by the dark period of the Nazi Occupation, these novellas reveal Modiano’s fascination with the lost, obscure, or mysterious: a young person’s confusion over adult behavior; the repercussions of a chance encounter; the search for a missing father; the aftershock of a fatal affair. To read Modiano’s trilogy is to enter his world of uncertainties and the almost accidental way in which people find their fates.
Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (The Margellos World Republic of Letters) Reviews
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Patrick Modiano, age 24, Paris, 1969 - From Flowers of Ruin: "Back then, the gates of Paris where all in vanishing perspectives, the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots. And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner."
Patrick Modiano’s prose is all about atmosphere, subtle moods, elusiveness of memory and poetry of feelings. In keeping with the author’s aesthetic of alighting upon specific remembrances as if returning again and again to a particular park bench on foggy Paris evenings, I will focus on Flowers of Ruin, the novella in this collection of three where the images have really stuck with me, repeatedly emerging in my memory, resurfacing, as if, as Ezra Pound put it in his short poem, “petals on a wet, black bough.”
We read of the narrator's first obsession noted in Flowers of Ruin, as related in 1986, age forty-seven, the year of his recounting this somber tale: "April 24, 1933. A young married couple commits suicide for no apparent reason. It's 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." Indeed, the unnamed narrator retraces the steps of the couple along deserted Paris streets, consults police reports, scrutinizes isolated clues about how the couple met up with two women and then two men in their random zigzag across Montparnasse that evening, all in an attempt to piece together the actual events leading up to the what newspapers at the time labeled “the tragic orgy.”
Then, as if a dreamy nocturne for piano changing key, the narrator slides into another recollection: after running away from boarding school at age fourteen, he meets someone a bit older then himself in a café, standing at the bar, who offers help and makes a deep, abiding impression. As he puts it: "A pretty Danish girl with short blond hair and periwinkle eyes. She used slang words that clashed with her soft, childlike accent. Slang that was often outmoded. When she saw me come in, she said: ”What the fuck are you doing here, old top?” I confessed that I was playing hooky.” This reflection fades out, leaving us with the Danish girl’s short blond hair, her periwinkle eyes and her slang words, only to reemerge toward the end of the story with a touch more detail.
Sticking with the metaphor of changing musical key in a piano nocturne, the story takes additional shifts and slides until the narrator conveys how, when in his early twenties, he first encounters an older man in the vicinity of a university who looks like he could be anywhere between thirty-five and fifty and goes by the name of Pacheco, a man who comes to dominate much of his reflections: “Where did he really live? I imagine him walking straight ahead, up to the Porte de Versailles, and finally reaching that desolate boulevard that bore the name of his ancestor. He walked along it slowly, suitcase in hand, like a sleepwalker, and at that late hour he was the only pedestrian.”
Once again, the narrator takes on the role of amateur detective, using the two names this man gave him to sift through old newspapers to garner scraps of information. He comes up with a few family facts and confronts Pacheco the very next time he sees him at his usual haunt, a university café. Pacheco replies that he has no idea what he is talking about. Then Pacheco disappears for a time.
The narrator continues his investigation and unearths a few more details, including how Pacheco might be someone who was wanted by the government for colluding with the enemy during the war and might even be a survivor of the Dachau concentration camp. When Pacheco finally reappears, the narrator immediately confronts him with his findings. As readers we wonder why the narrator is so persistent with someone he barely knows. We are eventually given a clue: there exists much in common between Pacheco and the narrator’s father, a businessman whose disappearance and death during the Paris occupation left the narrator with many unanswered questions.
Other men and women, happening and events bloom in Modiano’s Flowers of Ruin, including the alluring Jacqueline and her luxurious fur coat, a young lady the narrator meets and eventually lives with when in Paris during his twenties. But the facts of the story are not exactly what makes Modiano’s writing so hypnotic; rather, it’s the narrator’s ability to draw a reader into the intimacy of his feeling tone, his created Parisian mood as he travels to times past, his very personal impressions as he paints with words as literary counterpoint to a painting by Maurice Utrillo, Gustave Caillebotte or Camille Pisssario.
Above all, for Patrick Modiano, it’s how our memories comes alive and then fade, almost as if they were like the marquis the story’s narrator observes from an upper floor window across a Paris street one rainy night: “Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain, from failing on him so heavily, had dissolved him, the way water dilutes a fresco that hasn’t had time to dry properly. As hard as I pressed my head against the glass and peered at the dark gray wall, no trace of him remained.”
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"Back then, the gates of Paris where all in vanishing perspectives, the city gradually loosened its grip and faded into barren lots. And one could still believe that adventure lay right around every street corner."
A young Patrick Modiano
In these three novellas, Patrick Modiano's writing is all about the elusive past. He paints a picture of Paris in the aura of nostalgia, like in a black-and-white art film of the past. We're reminded time after time that the nooks and crannies being described no longer exist, lost to time.“The world to which these people belonged revived some memories from childhood: it was my father’s world...... I rescue them from the void one final time before they sink back into it forever.”
Modiano's father is a recurring theme in all these stories as they have a vague connection with the Occupation era. His father had refused to wear the Yellow badge and did not turn himself in when Paris Jews were rounded up for deportation to Nazi concentration camps. He was picked up in February 1942, and narrowly missed being deported, after an intervention from a friend. During the war years Albert Modiano did business on the black market, hanging around with the Carlingue, the French Gestapo auxiliaries (mentioned in the text as the "Rue Lauriston gang"). Its leaders were recruited from the underworld. Albert never clearly spoke of this period to his son before his death in 1977.
Modiano's narrators are each inexplicably drawn towards characters with vague pasts. There is a fog building up in these memories, a mystery that time never managed to touch. Each character and their histories form the musings of these narrators, and the central themes of each of these novellas.
Afterimage (French: Chien de printemps; published 1993)
In Afterimage we find the narrator reminiscing the days he spent in the company of a tactful introvert photographer by the name of Jansen. The story describes Jansen's eccentricities and describes the characters in his life and muses on the blanks in his past that the narrator strives to fill in.
Suspended Sentences (French: Remise de peine; published 1988)
The story of two brothers living together among a family of strangers who take care of the children as their parents are on tour elsewhere. The semi-autobiographical novel seems to borrow themes from Modiano's personal conversations with his father as a child. The characters mentioned in the novel that surround the two children all have vague, mysterious personalities and elusive pasts.
Vintage Paris at night, 1956
Flowers of Ruin (French: Fleurs de ruine; published 1991)"April 24, 1933. A young married couple commits suicide for no apparent reason.
It’s 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."
New story, new narrator. New obsessions. We now take a dip into the world of an unusual murder-suicide. A tragic orgy, and the characters that may or may not be related to the incident. As the inconclusive details stop, our narrator finds a new obsession: an enigmatic character by the name of Pacheco, whose true identity seems to be getting more elusive with each sentence.
Who really is Pacheco? Well, you've got to read to find out!
"I imagine him walking straight ahead, up to the Porte de Versailles, and finally reaching that desolate boulevard that bore the name of his ancestor. He walked along it slowly, suitcase in hand, like a sleepwalker, and at that late hour he was the only pedestrian."
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Patrick Modiano's Novellas of Memory and Things Past
Note: My thanks to Yale University Press which made this translation of Modiano's
Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas available through Netgalley. This publication, ISBN 9780300198058, became available for purchase on November 11, 2014 and is available for a purchase price of $16.00. The edition is published in paperback. Translation is by Mark Polizotti.
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”― Marcel Proust
Modiano, the first novel, 1968, age twenty-three
I wondered if those members of the Yale University Press involved in the publication of this collection of three novellas by
Patrick Modiano had a remarkable sense of prescience. For the Nobel Committee announced on October 9, 2014, that Modiano was awarded the Nobel for Literature..."for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation".
Modiano, Nobel Winner, 2014, age sixty-nine
Peter Englund the permanent Secretary to the Nobel Committee freely admitted that Modiano was not well known outside of France. However, Modiano is the author of nearly thirty books, most of which have been translated into European languages. Before winning the Nobel, Modiano had been recognized by Germany for his first novel "La Place de l'étoile" published in 1968 about a Jewish collaborator during World War II as one of the great Post Holocaust Novels in 2010. He received the Prix Goncourt in 1978, Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française in 1972, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca from the Institut de France for his lifetime achievement in 2010, and the 2012 Austrian State Prize for European Literature.
Yet, few of Modiano's works are available in English. The Nobel Committee's announcement had many Americans and English scratching their heads wondering just who Patrick Modiano was. I certainly was. The name flickered somewhere in my memory, but I could not place it. Over the days following the Nobel announcement, Modiano and his world began to emerge. Then his name and his image clicked with me. The film "Lucien, Lacombe," directed by Louis Malle with the screenplay co-authored by Modiano. Dealing with a young member of the French Gestapo, it was a portrait of Occupied France, a theme to which Modiano returns to time and again. The screenplay is available in English. See:
Lucien Lacombe, New York, Viking, 1975.
The haunting film from 1974 captures the division of Occupied France, a theme evident in "Suspended Sentences
The Novellas
The three novellas were written over a five year period. However, in the French Omnibus edition, Modiano wrote in his introduction that these books"form a single work...I thought I'd written them discontinuously, in successive bouts of forgetfulness, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences recur from one to the other."
Clearly, these novellas are highly autobiographical in nature. Modiano does not deny this, although, he maintains that the characters are "fictionally autobiographical." By implication, for this reader, Modiano's statement is one on the nature of memory, for memory is internal to the keeper of memory. It is unique to the owner of the memory. And while those people may be remembered by many, each person's perception of the person remembered may be completely different. But what is real? How accurate is memory? Or is perception reality?
Afterimage "Chien de printemps," Dog of Spring, (1993) The story of a photographer, Jansen, who had meticulously recorded a Paris that no longer existed, a city changed by new construction, a photographer who had taken portraits of people long gone, some dead. Jansen had been a student of Robert Capa. Capa, the famous war photographer, on the beaches at Normandy, who photographed France's Indochina war, dying May 25, 1954, when he stepped on a Viet Minh landmine.
The story is told by an anonymous narrator, easily enough supposed to be Modiano. He tells us he met Jansen in 1964 when he was only nineteen, which would have been Modiano's age. How easily memory is triggered. He is writing this story in 1992, having found a picture Jansen had taken of him and his girl friend in the spring of 1964. But, "[t]he memory of Jansen pursued me all afternoon and would follow me forever: Jansen would remain someone I'd barely had time to know."
Curiously, Jansen and, shall we say Modiano, had gone to Jansen's studio after meeting. Modiano perused Jansen's huge collection of photographs. On the walls were portraits of a younger Jansen and a smiling Capa. There was a portrait of a beautiful woman, Colette Laurent, gone now. Jansen had no catalog of his many photographs. The young man took it upon himself to catalog them, because it was a photographic history of a past that must be preserved. Jansen took to calling his young pupil his scribe. He identified each individual in each photograph. Yet, Jansen will disappear leaving the young Scribe with only a catalog of photographs that no longer exist, memories that cannot be grasped, people that cannot be known, for they are Jansen's alone. This is a signature theme of Modiano to introduce us to those whose personalities cannot be grasped. There is a vague detachment, and the uncomfortable fact that life is not as certain as we might like it to be.
Suspended Sentences Remise de peine (1988)"After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.”―
James Agee,
A Death in the Family
This novella most strongly represents Modiano's central themes of memory and the Occupation of France, for me. What makes it most intriguing is that Modiano sorts through his childhood memories of living with his brother in the care of Annie and her associates with whom his mother, an actress, has left them while she is on tour in a stage production.
The hero of this novella is Patoche, a diminutive of Patrick. His brother is unnamed. Patoche illustrates how the memories of childhood may shine with crystalline brilliance in the knowledge of names, faces, and places. However, the significance of the people that surround a child, and their connections to one another have no meaning to a child without explanation. Memory still leaves questions which can never be answered and may haunt us through our lives.
It is tempting to us Modiano's autobiography,
Un pedigree, written in 2005, as a reader's guide to these novellas, especially Suspended Sentences. For there are so many things in Modiano's life that emerge in the pages of Patoche's memories that seemingly occurred in real life.
The woman, Annie, in whose care Patoche is left, was really Suzanne Bouqueran. Frede, Annie's close friend, is the nickname of Suzanne Baule' who ran a nightclub. Could it be that Annie and her compatriots who come and go, seemingly without reason, are members of the Carlingue, a gang of collaorateurs during the Occupation? Here they are the Rue Lauriston gang.
The Carlingue, "French Gestapo," Convicted and Condemned following the Liberation
Patoche and his brother are sometimes visited by their father. He is frequently accompanied by a number of business associates. There is an indication that he had once been a dealer in wines and liquors by the truckload. Father speaks of a chateau, now in ruins, to which he takes the boys to tour. The property had been seized by the United States Army as the product of illegal gains. Father tells the boys to keep an eye on the place because the Marquis who had owned the Chateau would return one day, although he and his wife had fled France at the end of the War. Another member of the Carlingue? There is no definite answer. Some questions have no answers. With memory comes mystery.
Modiano plays with the reader as a cat does a mouse. Patoche takes us forward in time to his twenties when he meets Jean D., who used to come to Annie's home when Patoche was ten. Jean D. has done time in prison--seven years. Jean and Patoche speak of the old days. Patoche tells him he is writing his first book.
Patoche reveals that during the War his father had been arrested as a Jew. However his father was released through the efforts of a man named Eddie Pagnon. Why was his father arrested? His father will not tell him.
The answer must lie with Pagnon. But Patoche cannot talk to him. He was a member of the Rue Lauriston Gang, condemned and shot. Only his childhood memories may lead him to a garage he remembers, a garage that Annie drove to when he rode along with her. Why did she give him a cigarette case? Where did she go? Where did everyone go? Where did his brother go? Why was the house where he had lived empty one day?
Oh, Annie, how kind you were to me, Patoche. Perhaps I loved you a little bit. I remember how you looked, the smell of your hair, the softness of your shoulder, the blouse you wore with the skirt, the wide belt cinching your waist, I liked you best that way. Not in the tight pants, the boots, the cowboy jacket.
Brothers Rudy and Patrick Modiano. Rudy died of Leukemia at the age of ten in 1957. His death is just a whisper in Suspended SentencesRound like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind--Alan and Marilyn Bergman, 1968
Ruined Flowers Fleurs de ruine (1991)
The Present
"I reached Rue d'Ulm. It was deserted. Though I kept telling myself that there was nothing unusual about that on a Sunday evening in this studious provincial neighborhood, I wondered whether I was still in Paris. In front of me, the dome of the Pantheon It frightened me to be there alone, at the foot of that funereal monument in the moonlight and I veered off into Rue Lhomond."
April 24, 1933
A young married couple commits suicide for no apparent reason.
It's a strange story that occurred that night in the building at number 26 rue des Fosse's-Saint-Jacques, near the Pantheon, in the home of Mr. and MMe. T.
What possible connection can there be here? Ah. Our narrator from the present has acquired a copy of the police report of the 1933 suicide. He is tracing their same route of that evening in 1933. But why?
As he follows in the doomed couple's footsteps, our present day narrator thinks back to having lived in the Montparnasse Quarter in 1965 with Jacqueline. Before he went to Vienna. How our memories dart through our minds, a chain reaction of events, but smoothly, a stream of consciousness. Private. Our own. No one else's. No one knows what we are thinking.
He recalls his neighbor. A veteran of the Algerian War. Not quite truthful. Something a little false about a textile concern.
Back and forth. Back and forth. Following the route of that long dead couple, memories of his former neighbor twirling around inside his mind. Duvelz. That was his name. Insisted that he and Jacqueline come around and meet this woman. The face opening the door. A woman with a scar on her cheek.
Things go rather squirrely. Duvelz introduces the woman. Our man can't remember her name. She and Duvelz were even engaged once, but she had to go marry someone else. Oh, her husband's out of town. They can all go out together. Or not. Duvelz strokes the scar on the woman's cheek. He opens her blouse and fondles her breast. Casually, "We were in a serious auto accident a while back."
Are you not spellbound? Can you stop reading? I could not. Where do the dots connect? Do they connect? Is this Modiano seeking out mystery for the sake of mystery? Sometimes he looks for it where there is none. He will tell you so.
Ruined Flowers is a series of spiraling puzzles that links the Paris of today to a Paris that was, some of which has vanished forever. Those memories which appear to be linked with reality perhaps are those that haunt us the most.
This is a solid FOUR star read. Highly recommended. These novellas served me well as an entrance to the world of Patrick Modiano. They should do the same for any reader.
EXTRAS!
Patrick Modiano: Literary Giant, France Today, November 15, 2011;
http://www.francetoday.com/articles/2...
Patrick Modiano, a Modern ‘Proust,’ Is Awarded Nobel in Literature, NYTimes Review of Books, October 9, 2014;
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/boo...
Patrick Modiano’s Postwar World, Alexandra Schwarz, The New Yorker, OCTOBER 9, 2014;
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...
Why You Haven’t Heard of Patrick Modiano, Winner of the Nobel in Literature, Megan Gibson, Time Magazine, October 9, 2014;
http://time.com/3484744/nobel-prize-l...
Soundtrack
Edith Piaf - Non, je ne regrette rien;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFtGf...
Jacques Brel - Ne Me Quitte Pas;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2wmK...
Tina Arena - Les moulins de mon cœur/The Windmills of Your Mind (Live);
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdovT...
Love theme from "Les parapluies de Cherbourg" (1964);
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7Unn... -
Modiano's writing is, for me... magical, haunting, obsessed. He is obsessed with the notion that life is ephemeral, and thus exists almost entirely as memory..., while that memory is fading...fleeing like a mist into the void of a distant darkness, as we hurtle away from it... into a very different (or not so different) darkness of our own... He writes with sense of poignancy...
He is also obsessed with Paris... with the city, its streets, its neighborhoods, that are themselves being torn awy from him by its modernization..., like shades being torn from the grasp of Odysseus in the underworld...
Of course, I am reading him in english -- but he writes so simply and clearly that translation is probably less of a distorting lens than it might otherwise be. -
3.5
I was prompted to read Modiano because of reviews from GR friends in which some of the most interesting comments arose from different translations of the title
Rue des Boutiques Obscures. Its English title is Missing Person, which could be the title of this collection as well. The translator of this book notes that Modiano's style is "straightforward and clear", but the titles of its three novellas are another matter; he then explains why he made the choices he did.
In Afterimage (Chien de printemps) a young man is obsessed with a photographer who mysteriously comes and goes. In Suspended Sentences (Remise de peine) a very young boy, protective of his younger brother, tries to make sense of the mysterious comings and goings of the adults taking care (or not taking care) of them. In Flowers of Ruin (a direct translation) a man plays detective, probing into the mysteries of those who might have been linked to his father in some way, in any way. In all three the mysteries and disappearances seem to be connected to French Occupation collaborationists.
I first felt a frisson during the first novella when a clue is given as to why the photographer might've disappeared, but that came with only a few pages left. By the time I got to the atmospheric second novella, easily my favorite, I was reminded of
William Maxwell in the way that a traumatic childhood incident is worked into fiction. Perhaps you need to know Paris (I don't at all) but his descriptions of the city in the last novella seemed to me to be mostly the naming of streets. I understand his reason for this, as I understand the reason for a list of names that include the streets these individuals lived on, even though the latter really have no bearing on the plot, not that there's much of a plot in any of these, except perhaps the second. Despite the repetitions, there's much to ponder here. -
Originally titled Remise de peine / Chien de printemps / Fleurs de ruine, (the English titles are Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin), Suspended Sentences is a trilogy of novels that Modiano has suggested is a kind of fictional autobiography, three slices of which, written at different times, not a coherent narrative across novellas. In them he reveals, among other things, his early relationships to his younger brother, whom he lost at an early age, and his father, who remained a mystery throughout his life. His focus on his father in this and other works has him join the company of other postmodern inquirers of mystery fathers such as Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude), or the chroniclers of at best complicated and at worst morally flawed fathers (Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception; Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life).
In his inquiry Modiano discovered that his Jewish-Italian father, Albert, spent the war years as a black marketeer associated with the notorious and brutal Rue Lauriston gang, also known as the French Gestapo. His father himself revealed nothing to him, which left Modiano with a lifetime of questions, for which he found few answers. What he learns he learns as with most everything and everyone from the past that he explores in his writing: Scraps of information, told in elusive but compellingly evocative detail, with grace and spare beauty.
“Every time I look at that picture, it hurts. It's like in the morning when you try to recall your dream from the night before, but all that's left are scraps that dissolve before you can put them together. I knew that woman in another life and I'm doing my best to remember. Maybe someday I'll manage to break through that layer of silence and amnesia.”
I think as I read: Who was my father? Who is anyone from our past? We know details, we have anecdotes, and yet they remain fragmentary. Early on, in the eighties, I learned from reading literary and cultural theory that identity—mine or anyone else’s--isn’t an “essence” but is multiple, shifting, with gaps and fissures, less “born this way”—though I understand the importance of this claim—than socially constructed, and partly an invention. But still, I want to know what I can of my father.
“One would like to make the dead talk, one would especially like them to come back for real, and not merely in our dreams where they stand beside us, but so far away and so absent. . . .”
The Swedish Academy, in awarding him the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature, honored him “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation.” The narrator in these stories seems inseparable from Modiano. Along the way he uncovers his own past, his brother and father, Paris, though the Occupation is central for him, and especially, his father’s role in it. Part fiction, part memoir, lines blurred. Mysteries, of an existential sort.
Afterimage, the most affecting of the three, is a tale of a young writer obsessively cataloguing the work of Jansen, a photographer who does everything he can to be forgotten. Then, one day, Jansen simply disappears. As the narrator remarks, “Of all the punctuation marks, he told me, ellipses were his favorite.” The title novella is a child’s perspective on being raised with his brother by a colorful gang of people as his parents are on the road for months at a time. Both wonder and confusion reign for the children. In Flowers of Ruin, a double suicide case occasions inquiry into several gangsters and collaborators of the Occupation. Each story is a portrait of the artist as a young man. The 20-year-old dropout gradually began to write more and more, and then,
“Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.”
"I'm racking my brains to remember as many details as I can," Modiano writes in "Flowers of Ruin:"
"… It was at 19 Boulevard Raspail. In 1965. A grand piano at the very back of the room. The sofa and the two armchairs were made of the same black leather. The coffee table of chrome-plated metal. A name like Devez or Duvelz. The scar on the cheek. The unbuttoned blouse. A very bright light as if from a projector, or rather a flashlight. It lights only a portion of the scene, an isolated instant, leaving the rest in shadow. We will never know what happened next or who those two people really were."
I first read Modiano’s Missing Persons, and next, what I have heard is his masterpiece, Dora Bruder. I very much like his haunting, compelling prose that encourages my own memory work. -
Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano published his short novel Remise de peine in 1988 and an English translation by Mark Polizzotti was published in 2014 and this is the excellent work that I enjoyed.
Comprising three distinct and previously published novellas - Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin – this sets a mood and atmosphere that is compelling, mesmerizing and bewildering.
Though set later in time, these all are shadowed by the German occupation of Paris during the 40s and the events described in the stories have traces of this dark time indelibly connected with the actions Modiano depicts.
Some readers will likely find this a slow, methodical work, but for a sensitive reader, Modiano’s keen attention to detail and his ability to portray subtle emotions is adept. These read like introspective crime stories though the subject matter may be the annotation of photographs or the confusion of a child.
I am intrigued and may read more from this author.
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2.5 stars that lurch into 3 stars because I round up but it’s not a solid three stars like a number of other works I award 3 stars too (I was thinking of only giving 2 stars). Was not my cup of tea. The writing was good, but I did not see the point, really, of any of the three novellas, in which the protagonist recollects from his memory aspects of his life in Paris either as a boy or a young adult. All three novellas involve at least one time period in which the Germans occupied France during WWII. The first novella, Afterimage, was originally published as Cien de printemps (1993); the second, Suspended Sentences as Remise de peine in 1988, and the third as Fleurs de ruine in 1991.
The translator, Mark Polizzotti, wrote the Introduction and it is titled as ‘Missing’. I read the Introduction after reading the 3 novellas and in a way I do not feel so bad about being confused or not knowing what these were about. Polizzotti says:
• A feeling of indirection pervades many of Patrick Modiano’s writings, and the three short novels in this volume are no exception. For all the specificity of detail—locations catalogued with loving prevision, particular casts of light and shadow—one can’t escape a sense of haziness, as if everything were shrouded in gauze or viewed through a Vaselined lens.
So, that’s not too good if one wants to grasp what the point of a novel is…I don’t need to be hit over the head with something so as to make it exceedingly clear regarding the point of a novel but if I am looking at the plot line through a Vaselined lens….. ☹ …
This writer won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. Apparently he was a dark horse in that a lot of people had never heard of him when the award was announced (or at least literary critics who were not conversant with the French language—Yale University Press and several other presses in 2015-2017 were responsible for re-publishing in English nine of his previous works dating as far as back as 1968.
A Wikipedia bio of Modiano:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick...
Reviews of Suspended Sentences (three novellas):
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https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
•
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...
• I liked this review from a blog site:
https://michaelkfreundt.com/2017/09/1...
I had to look up two words. Lugubrious [looking or sounding sad and dismal] and onomatopoeias [process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as "oink", "meow" (or "miaow"), "roar" and "chirp"]. -
At that moment a phenomenon occurred for which I'm still trying to find an explanation.... Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain... falling on him so heavily, had dissolved him....He had vanished in that sudden way that I'd later notice in other people...which leaves you so puzzled...you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed.
This quote, which comes at the end of the third and last novella in Suspended Sentences, seems to me, to sum up the essence of Modiano's writing in all three (and perhaps in other books I have yet to read). He (and his alter-egos) is a man searching through his memories and those of the many people he meets (both randomly and those he seeks out), for ways to learn more of his past, of the past of Paris and of France during the first half of the twentieth century, leading up to and especially including the Occupation by Hitler's Germany.
All three novellas deal with this in different ways. In the first, Afterimage, a young man makes the acquaintance of a photographer of repute and works with him for a time. There is a comradeship based on work, photos, memory of events, the past and questions of the future.
In the second, Suspended Sentences, two quite young boys are left in the care of three women in the outskirts of Paris while their parents are traveling. The oldest is just old enough to read into some things that happen around him but not quite old enough to interpret them well. As an adult, he tries to work out the details.
In the third, Flower of Ruin, the story folds back and forth between people and events with the constants being Paris and memory and (un)truth. I found this story the most confusing but, in the end, I think it explains much about the author's goals and purpose.
So many things are striking in the writing here. One example from Flower of Ruin:
The Champs-Elysees...It's like that pond a British
novelist talks about, at the bottom of which, in layered
deposits, lie the echoes of the voices of every passerby
who has daydreamed on its banks. The shimmering water
preserves those echoes forever and, on quiet evenings,
they all blend together. (loc 2001)
Modiano is continuously reworking the themes of memory, truth, identity, the war, collaboration---coming at them from multiple angles in these stories. How much is autobiographical, how much is fiction, no one but the author can say, but there are known elements of his life present.
Another aspect of his writing that interests me is how he recreates a past he can only ever partially know out of scraps of knowledge and then passes it on to the reader as "glimpses". Could this be why he so often remarks on light or it's absence? He also uses nature to obscure with rain and fog and clouds.
The more I think about this, the more I find to consider. I do believe I will read this again as well as more of Modiano's writing.
Definitely recommended
Thank you to the publisher and Net Galley for providing a copy of this book in return for an honest review. -
I had not heard of Patrick Modiano until he recently won the Nobel Prize for Literature, so I was naturally curious and jumped at the chance to read an advance copy of this book before the publication of it’s translation in November. The book consists of three novellas, “Afterimage,” “Suspended Sentences”, and “Flowers of Ruin”.
I don’t read French, but I was taken by the language in the first and second pieces, so I guess that’s a tribute to the translator, Mark Polizzotti. A sadness and a vagueness seems to pervade stories with the narrator of each trying to remember people and events from their past. Yet in spite of the vague feeling, the descriptions of the streets of Paris or a small town near Paris resonate with a clearness that allows you feel what it was like to be there.
I had the feeling throughout that there was something mysterious about the people of the past, something not fully told. All are about someone trying remembering the past but it’s hard to know if these narrators are reliable. In the first story, “ Afterimage”, it’s hard to know why Francis Jansen, a photographer just wants to remain unknown, even when our narrator thinks that Jansen’s work is good enough to be cataloged and written about. Then we discover that he has been in an internment camp and we learn of an illicit affair with a young married woman.
In “Suspended Sentences”, I was especially impressed with the descriptions of the streets of Paris streets with shops and cafes. The young boy, too naïve to understand about the gang of people that were caring for him, was a sympathetic character.
I got lost in the last story, which started out with our narrator remembering a double suicide of a young husband and wife. About halfway through I just became a bit confused about the all of the people that begin to inhabit the narrator’s memory. I really didn’t follow it.
In any event, I learned a little about Modiano’s writing. I liked the language but not sure if I really understood what he was trying to say. I gave it three stars because I was taken enough by the writing to maybe try one of his full length novels if there is an English translation made available.
Thanks to Yale University Press and NetGalley. -
2014 Nobel edebiyat ödülüne layık görülen Modiano’yu ilk kez okudum, gayet etkileyici buldum. Kitap otobiyografik öğelerin baskın olduğu anlaşılan üç novelladan oluşuyor. Fonda da 1960’ların Paris’i, özellikle de şehrin kentsel dönüşümle yitip giden kısımları var. Bu yönüyle Paris’e yapılacak bir seyahatte okunması ayrı bir keyif verebilir.
Kitabın ana izleği geçmişin görünmeyen unsurlarını ortaya çıkarma, bir nevi hesaplaşma, bu şekilde bir kimlik bina etme çabası olarak söylenebilir. Her daim bir belirsizlik, bir gizem havası var. Karakterler veya olaylar bir noktaya kadar aydınlatılıyor, tam netleştirilmeden bırakılıyor. Ama bu çok ustaca, sıkmadan, ölçüsünde yapılmış, harika bir atmosfer kurulmuş.
Kitabın müphem havasına karşın Modiano’nun üslubu çok yalın, ama etkileyici. Zaten esas mesele az sözle güçlü etki yaratmakta herhalde...
İngilizce çevirmeni önsözde, 5 yıllık bir dönem içinde ayrı ayrı yayınlanan bu novellaların Fransızca ilk toplu basımında Modiano’nun aslında bunların tek bir kitap olarak görülmesi gereğine dikkat çektiğini hatırlatıyor. Bizde bu şekilde basılmamış. İnternetten görebildiğim kadar sadece üçüncü novella “Yıkıntı Çiçekleri” başlığıyla Can Yayınları tarafından basılmış. -
Read Afterimage🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Read title novella Suspended Sentences 🌟🌟🌟🌟
Read Flowers of Ruin🌟🌟🌟 -
I put
Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas by the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature,
Patrick Modiano on a challenge list for myself and I'm very glad I did. It's a book that I probably would have given up on quickly, much to my loss.
Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas was the only work I could find of Modiano that has been translated into English. I'm sure since winning the Prize, more of his work will be translated. I don't know anything about his other books but this one was wonderful.
The book consists of three stories that feel somewhat related-perhaps because they all feature a narrator named Patrick (or some variant thereof), two as a young man and one, the title story, as a boy.
In the first story, "Afterimage," the narrator meets a recluse photographer who is disappearing even while he's there. The most recurrent phrases are "silence" and "absence," words that could serve almost as definitions, certainly as themes, of all the stories. In fact, the more specific with place names the stories are (as in the last story, "Flowers of Ruin," with its invocation of Baudelaire), the more elusive they are. By the last story, I found the material slipping away even as was reading it.
Despite this (or is it because of this?), the stories are mesmerizing and evocative of things unsaid, unknown, and things lost. Whether it is a father or mother, a friend, an acquaintance, a brother, a girlfriend, there is a sense of fog, of things there but not there, disappearing before us. The harder I tried to hold on, the more the story seemed to slip away from me.
The stories reminded me slightly of
W.G. Sebald's work, especially
Austerlitz. There is a sense of specificity that masks something else, perhaps the insubstantial quality of the apparently concrete, the mist of memory, a feeling of loss that pervades the characters and their lives.
The stories apparently share many aspects of the author's life but it is not necessary to know anything about that in order to relish these stories. They are like entering a dream state.
I read the stories in translation, so I cannot speak to the quality of the writing in the original (which I would like to attempt to read) but certainly the writing in the translation is poetic and lovely.
I highly recommend this book, especially to those looking to explore this Nobel Prize winner's work. I did not know about this author before he won the prize; I am very glad to have read some of his work. I look forward to reading more as they are translated into English. -
When I heard that French author Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2014, I was embarrassed never to have heard of him before, especially since I teach world literature, minored in French in college, and lived in France for a short time. When I asked my other francophile friends about him, none of them had ever heard of him either. So, of course, I ran to the public library to satisfy my curiosity about this mystery author only to realize after reading "Suspended Sentences," that there is a reason some authors are obscure, virtually unknown, and they should probably remain that way. While there were a few pretty and nostalgic descriptions of places in France in all three novellas in this book, none were enough to save this self-indulgent (autobiography pretending to be fiction), name-dropping, train wreck of a book scattered with two-dimensional characters. I can't count the number of times I dozed off and dropped this book while reading it...in broad daylight, no less. I am so grateful that I did not waste money on this one. What on earth was the Nobel Prize committee thinking??? Any other author nominated this year would have been more worthy of the award, especially Haruki Murakami. That said, I might give Modiano one more chance by attempting to read another of his works. Everyone deserves a second chance, and I guess that's why libraries exist.
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Each new Modiano I read just adds to the little box unoriginally labeled "Modiano's illusory place "in my mind. When I read his novel I often have this Déjà vu effect: have I read this particular one before? But it is a good feeling. It is a bit like looking at an old photo and each time being able to pick up a new detail in the smudged and blurred parts that seemed to be totally ineligible before. I think that feeling is also very familiar to his protagonists. They often suddenly remember things from the past that they hardly could explain or put together. In other times they are desperately looking for some missing piece just to see how it slips away from their hands:
"It's like in the morning when you try to recall your dream from the night before, but all that's left are scrapes that dissolve before you can put them together. I knew that woman in another life and I'm doing best to remember. Maybe someday I'll manage to break through that layer of silence and amnesia".
This book contains three novels. And all of them were delightful additions to my little box. I've got only a little insecurity related to the translation. Straightaway after this book, I've read an extended essay by Mark Polizzotti
Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto on translation. Mark is Modiano's translator into English. And after reading the essay, I am not anymore sure whether I've read Modiano's novels or the novels by Mark closely inspired by Modiano. I realise that when I read a book in translation I read the text not written by the other, but by the translator. But still my intention generally to get an access to the author's thoughts, words etc as close as I can. There is of course the whole spectrum of opinions between fidelity vs beauty. Mark seems to be much closer to the beauty's side of things. I might pick this debate up if/when I write my thoughts about his essay. But here I will show how it was relevant.
I wanted to write a point about the title of first novel in this book "Afterimage". It is a very poignant choice per se. Afterimage is a trace of the image when we close our eyes after looking at something vivid. I am not sure whether Mark was thinking about this particular effect of the word, the one I find the most exciting. But he writes in the intro:
"Ultimately I decided to forgo the original (only the title I hope) altogether and concentrate on what this novella seemed most to be about: a retrospective attempt to see, an exercise in hindsight, an afterimage".
That is good, but the original title in French was "Chien de printemps" which as Mark has pointed out was totally forgone together with whatever connotation it might have created. There was a note about this. But then how many other images created by the author were replaced by the totally different images created by the translator?
This is probably not the right place to discuss this issue at length, and I try not to doubt too much my faith in the translation. But it just reminded me again how good to know a lot of languages so one can read Modiano without such type of doubts. -
In these three short novels, Modiano's narrator moves through a world where a cast of misfits and eccentrics prove to be neither who nor what they seem. The spectre of wartime collaboration haunts the tales, as it did post-war France. Peugeot 203s abound. The true protagonist of the trilogy is Paris, its streets and café-bars. The identity of city is morphing throughout too.
The title piece concerns a boy, whom we understand effectively to be Modiano, who spends a year living in a strange household with three women of an undefined criminality. Odd spiv-type characters come and go. The narrator's main talent appears to be getting himself expelled from a series of schools. By the end, the women and their associates have all been arrested for "something very serious".
In Afterimage, the narrator is now in his late teens. He and his girlfriend, Jacqueline, meet by chance the Belgian photographer, Francis Jansen, and he offers to catalogue the photographs contained in three suitcases, almost the totality of Jansen's possessions. Jansen is in the process of disappearing from Paris and from his work as a photographer. He doesn't seem to take seriously the narrator's curation of his work. When Jansen and his suitcases finally vanish, the alphabetical index in a red Clairefontaine notebook is all that remains.
In Flowers of Ruin, the narrative moves on shifting sands. It begins with the narrator's quest to uncover the truth about the double suicide of a young married couple in 1933. It drifts to an account of a shabby character called Pacheco or Phillipe de Bellune, whom it turns out has stolen his identity from another man and is in fact one Charles Lombard. The young Lombard was somehow involved in the disinformation associated with the death of the young couple. The focus shifts to a second hand book dealer called Claude Bernard before bringing us back to Jacqueline and how the narrator met her.
The writing felt a bit lazy at times. I lost count of the number of women described as "a very pretty blonde". The slightly feverish ambience Modiano conjures up put me in mind of Sebald. There's also something of Auster in there too. The stories work well together as a series of mood pieces. -
Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley
It’s sad but I hadn’t heard of Patrick Modiano until he won the Nobel. Honestly, my first reaction was “who is that”.
Yeah, American press doesn’t do too well when it comes to books that require translation.
In terms of style, at least in these three novellas, a reader can see why Modiano won the Nobel Prize. There is a beauty in the simple sentences that are not over loaded with unnecessary words or description. It isn’t so much the simple setting of the stories in Paris that bring the city to mind, it is Modiano’s writing. I can’t really describe what aspect of his writing does this, but there is something of Paris in the style (or at least how the style is translated).
But in terms of plot, at some points the point felt a little loose and a little lost at times. This is particularly true of the last story, “Ruined Flowers”, and far less true of the middle story, the title story itself. This story is about a young boy, his brother, and his mysterious guardians. The first story, “Afterimage” is stronger than the last story and almost as gripping as the second. It concerns a photographer as viewed though the memories of man who himself is reaching the photographer’s age. It doesn’t have the mystery that “Suspended Sentences” does. IT is more melancholy, and yet, strangely, slight more hopeful.
In many ways, the stories are shadows, constantly shifting, murky, like night in the city of lights. -
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La critica più frequente che viene mossa in Francia a P. Modiano è quella di scrivere sempre lo stesso romanzo. Seppure non sia una considerazione originale (è un appunto mosso a molti, e per altri un indispensabile cardine compositivo), probabilmente risponde anche a verità. Lo scrittore è emerso all'attenzione dei lettori transalpini verso la fine degli anni Sessanta, introdotto alla grande editoria dalla sua amicizia con R. Queneau. In un momento storico come quello delle contestazioni studentesche, così verboso, analitico, acceso e fortemente polemico, Modiano si distinse subito per l'impalpabile delicatezza della sua scrittura, che si distaccava da ogni movimento artistico-letterario contemporaneo. Le vicende che narra si svolgono sempre negli anni immediatamente successivi alla IIGM, quelli della sua l'infanzia. I personaggi che vi si agitano sono sempre in qualche modo scampati alla guerra. Riemergono cioè da un periodo oscuro, disgraziato per l'intera umanità, durante il quale l'imperativo della sopravvivenza ha obbligato molti a scelte estreme, in qualche caso bieche, di cui tuttavia nessuno parla più, ora che il peggio è alle spalle. In Riduzione di pena sono proprio i bambini a osservare questi adulti, le loro vicende, e a interrogarsi sullo strano silenzio che circonda alcuni loro gesti, o il mistero di certi loro comportamenti. Generalmente in tutti i suoi romanzi Modiano sfiora così la crudezza della vita, sempre e solo interrogandosi, lasciando poi al lettore l'eventuale risposta. E' dettagliato nelle descrizioni, nelle circostanze, attento ai fatti e ai luoghi, ma si arresta sempre davanti alla verità sulle persone. Questa la delicatezza. Non si addentra nei paradigmi del dolore. Lascia che sia la nostra esperienza a declinarlo per intero.
PS: 9 ott. 2014 - A Monsieur Modiano è stato attribuito il Premio Nobel per la letteratura 2014. Merci beaucoup à qui me l'a fait connaître. -
Cuốn này mình mua ở tiệm sách cũ với giá chỉ 5$ mà như mới. Cuốn sách gồm 3 tiểu thuyết (rất) ngắn sắp ra mắt ở Việt Nam mà sẽ tách làm 3 quyển mỏng dính với giá khá chát :))).
Đọc Modiano trong những ngày âm u, mưa xám xịt thấy hợp quá, vì cảm giác câu chuyện của ông được bao phủ bởi một màng sương mờ mịt, không có gì rõ ràng, chẳng có chi là chắc chắn mà trong đó mối quan hệ giữa những con người với nhau mới mỏng manh làm sao, chỉ cần một tác động nhỏ đã đứt phụt, người ta ngồi kế bên chuyện trò hôm trước hôm sau đã bặt tăm và ta bèn lần mò những dấu vết để lại những mong tìm lại họ nhưng rồi cuối cùng chúng lại đưa ta đến những nơi chốn khác, những kỷ niệm khác mà trong những lúc lang thang ấy, bất chợt ta cũng muốn hóa thành làn khói mỏng mảnh, bốc hơi và biến mất không để lại bất kỳ tăm hơi nào. -
[Mar 2016]
Modiano e la messa in scena dei ricordi ...
Lo confesso, da tempo porto ormai nel mio cuore uno scrigno di meravigliosi ricordi d’infanzia (e non), che mi costringo a non aprire mai, col terrore di vederli svanire, svilire, contaminati dal mio mal di vivere. Leggere Modiano e avere la tentazione di andare a socchiudere quello scrigno è ormai diventato, purtroppo, una necessità.
Ma è un fatto che Modiano abbia il gusto della rievocazione. Non a caso la motivazione del Nobel recita: «Per l'arte della memoria con la quale ha evocato i destini umani più inesplicabili e scoperto il mondo della vita nel tempo dell'occupazione».
Qui, Modiano racconta, in chiave vagamente autobiografica, alcuni episodi vissuti nei primi anni Cinquanta dal piccolo Patoche e dal suo fratellino, affidati dai genitori, partiti per impegni artistici e di affari, presso alcune amiche in un sobborgo di Parigi. Sono brevi flashback di episodi assolutamente ordinari, rappresentazioni in bianco e nero, dove i due bambini vivono semplici episodi insieme alle donne e ai loro numerosi ospiti. Ma da ogni capitolo emergono immagini talmente vivide da risultare piccoli affreschi della quotidianità, vissuta con gli occhi di questo bambino con le brachette corte, insieme al fratellino, nelle loro meravigliose vestaglie da notte. Che meraviglia le automobiline dell’autoscontro …
Modiano afferma: «Si è debitori dell’età in cui si scrive.». Ma, ovviamente, si è debitori anche dell’età in cui si legge. Apprezzo la sua scrittura, le cose che racconta, ne traggo motivo di soddisfazione e appagamento; e questo, forse, anche perché tra noi non ci sono molti anni di differenza. Lui scrive e parla di cose che io ho praticamente vissuto. Un po’ come mi era successo con La misteriosa fiamma della Regina Loana. All’epoca avevo pensato che Eco avesse scritto, con ammiccante atteggiamento di complicità, proprio a beneficio di una ben precisa categoria … anagrafica di lettori.
Almeno, così mi piace credere … -
Afterimage (Chien de printemps) - 3 stars
Suspended Sentences (Remise de peine) - 5 stars
Flowers of Ruin (Fleurs de ruine) - 3 stars
Rating the novellas independently seems appropriate given they were originally published separately. Having this translation combine the three makes perfect sense though given their themes and sensibilities and has also been endorsed by the author himself.
In the introduction the translator compares Modiano's writing with “the atmosphere of Marcel Carne’s fog-drenched films, Edith Piaf’s smoky laments, and Brassai’s nocturnal photographs.” That is true but it is not the whole truth; Modiano's stories are disconcerting and ominous and full of secrets. The novellas are much alike in disposition and focus: Time playing tricks on memory, parents peripheral or nowhere to seen, missing people, occupation and the holocaust looming in the background.
I don't know enough about Modiano's life to determine the exact extent of them being autobiographical but plainly the storyteller in each novella is a version of the author. And it is clearly an author desperate to make sense of his early years, frustrated by how time and remembrance obscures and clouds what was.
“Suspended Sentences” is the story that really stands out for me. The narrative is more traditionally straightforward and I thought the gradual change from what seems a fairly idyllic setup to the sinister conclusion (as it were) was incredibly well executed. The resulting confusion and sense of rejection is very powerful. -
Modiano writes in subtle shades. He provides a detail look at situations which are distinctly vague and where the narrator is trying to understand some part of his history. None of the three novella have any denouement or aha moment, they just end with no conclusion. The author's fathers imprisonment as a Jew during WWII and his shady release (he was a black marketeer) appear as fictional episodes in most of the stories. No doubt he is a special writer but he is not one that appeals to me.
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Các cuốn nặng về hồi ký của Modiano đều kém hơn bình thường. Cuốn này thì khá hơn trong số các cuốn đó, có thể vì nó viết ở góc nhìn nhạy cảm: trẻ em. Buồn mà không biết phải buồn sao.
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The Nobel Prize for Literature is meant to consider an author's corpus of work as a whole, so maybe it is not fair for me to wonder why Suspended Sentences merits this kind of recognition. On the surface it is slow, vague, and its subtlety borders on simply having a lack of substance.
And yet, it is a beautiful book with three short stories that give you an impressionistic experience of memory. It is difficult or slow because it has so many gaps, and so many names of Parisian streets scattered in like anchors of remembrance that actually remind me of nothing. Is it because I am not a Parisian? Is it because I wasn't there to experience the Occupation? How do I enter the suspended worlds of the narrators? I feel like an isolated observer, attempting to grasp at air in the same way the narrators do...Modiano must have anticipated this effect?
In between "Suspended Sentences" and shortly into the last story, "Flowers of Ruin", I lost track. I had a lapse (or a lack of attention?), and nearly forgot I was in a different narratorial territory. These are a pastiche of other people's memories and Modiano did well stylistically with his page breaks that have that cinematic effect of fade ins and fade outs.
Somehow, this writing reminding me of Hesse's with those narrators who wander through hazy streets. I also kept thinking of Virginia Woolf. Not her novels, but her philosophy of style...the flickers of impressions that make up perception.
I won't remember much of this book...it is like reading in the fog. But maybe that's the point. -
I consider myself fairly well-read, so I was shocked when Patrick Modiano won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature because I had never even heard of him, a reaction shared by many other members of Goodreads' Constant Reader group. Thus, I was particularly pleased to receive an ARC of Suspended Sentences; after reading these three novellas, however, I have concluded that the Nobel committee and I are clearly on different wavelengths.
The best of the three was "Afterimage," at 3 stars. Modiano can write beautifully crafted sentences:Every time I look at that picture, it hurts. It's like in the morning when you try to recall your dream from the night before, but all that's left are scraps that dissolve before you can put them together. I knew that woman in another life and I'm doing my best to remember. Maybe someday I'll manage to break through that layer of silence and amnesia.
Unfortunately, these few gems were buried in a confusing, disjointed welter of impressions which would make no sense at all to someone unfamiliar with the Nazi occupation of France and Parisian geography. I gave 2 stars to "Suspended Sentences" only because I was able to find enough information on the Rue Lauriston gang on the Internet to understand who the characters were. The story went nowhere and ended so abruptly that I actually noted on my Kindle "That's it?"
"Flowers of Ruin" barely garnered 1 star; it was impossible to follow, and I had to force myself to finish it. The best description I can give is that it felt like strolling slowly through an unfamiliar city with an elderly man suffering from Alzheimer's as he offered random memories triggered by his surroundings. This is perhaps not surprising, as Peter Englund of the Swedish Academy called Modiano "a Marcel Proust of our time" whose works are "always variations of the same thing, about memory, about loss, about identity, about seeking." However, I never found myself struggling to identify characters and places while reading In Search of Lost Time because Proust, unlike Modiano, provided enough context for non-French readers. This may explain the relative dearth of English translations of Modiano's oeuvre.
I received a free copy of Suspended Sentences through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. -
Come in una nebbia molto leggera
Dopo un iniziale disorientamento per una storia che mi sembrava non ‘decollasse’, mi sono resa conto che era proprio quella sospensione a rendere la storia unica e interessante; era proprio quel procedere a flash ad essere l’anima della storia. Era proprio quella scrittura scarna ed essenziale a permettere di immedesimarmi nei pensieri dell’io narrante; era proprio quella semplicità dei periodi a consentirmi di fluttuare con naturalezza tra presente e passato; ed era proprio quella sensazione di evanescenza a rendere… reali le tracce della memoria di Patoche. E allora mi sono ritrovata a sentire viva, in sintonia con lo stesso Patrick (Modiano), la presenza di Annie, di Roger Vincent, della piccola Helène,… che camminavano dietro di lui e che in fondo non [lo] avevano mai lasciato.
Fino agli ultimi due capitoli, brevi come tutti i suoi pensieri, attutiti in un silenzio conclusivo, come in un risveglio sfumato.
Sono riconoscente a ScaP che, con il suo
commento, mi ha fatto incontrare P.M.. Mi rimangono ora il desiderio e la curiosità di approfondire la conoscenza, attraverso anche qualche scritto meno autobiografico, cominciando magari da
La place de l’Étoile («Ogni sera dovresti scrivere quel che hai fatto durante il giorno… Ti comprerò un quaderno apposta…» […] Avevo finito per seguire il consiglio di Annie: avevo appena finito il mio primo libro.).
....
9 ottobre 2014
Doppiamente riconoscente a ScaP: se non fosse stato per lui, non avrei neanche saputo chi fosse Patrick Modiano, oggi premio Nobel per la Letteratura.
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Stories without a soul, artificial inventions, suggestions of hidden meanings that lead nowhere. A waste of time!
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The author’s style is understated, but no one could accuse him of bland characterisation in these three novellas set mostly in 50s and 60s Paris and surrounds. Feature roles go to a mysterious photographer, a kindly lesbian/bisexual retired acrobat, a cruel mime artist, and a host of men with criminal connections who were possibly also collaborators during WWII but who are nevertheless charming (one of them has a smile that ‘envelopes him like a very light mist’). Oh, and there is also a very brief appearance by a woman whose ‘all-female, dance-cabaret’ includes an act called ‘Betty and the nice boys’.
I enjoyed the first two novellas very much. The first is centred on a photographer who, ironically, stresses the importance of erasing himself from the interactions he is attempting to capture on film. ‘Vague reference points and hazy silhouettes’ is a term used of the photographer’s work, and it applies equally to the author’s technique in the piece itself. We learn about the story’s lightly-drawn characters almost entirely from brief, studied observation and snatches of conversation. Very little is communicated through plot development. Much about the various characters remains unrevealed. Yet their presence is still intense, thanks mostly to the affectionate, intelligent gaze of the teenage narrator.
The second novella about childhood abandonment twice-over is quite different, and I found it the most moving. The story is told by a young schoolboy who recounts a year in which he and his beloved younger brother are sent by their mother - an actress on tour - to live with three women in a small village near Paris. The reader’s experience of the story pivots on two matter-of-fact sentences foretelling the fate of some of the characters, inserted into a mid-story reunion that occurs many years in the future, before we are returned to the main events. Consequently, the first half has a lightness and joy. But those sentences mean the second half is tinged with some apprehension on the part of the reader, even though the story returns to the same happy boyhood voice.
This book is about connectedness and separation of many different kinds. For me, this is most powerfully expressed in the intensity of the fraternal bond in the second novella - perhaps no surprise given the author at a young age experienced the death of his own younger brother. At one point, the young boy describes how a twilight scene - no doubt unremarkable to adults - ‘made our hearts pound, my brother’s and mine’. And their closeness permeates the story. Yet within the tale - in one line - the author tells us even that bond does not last. -
"'You understand, kid, it's like every one of those pictures was a like of guilty conscience for me...'"
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From 'Afterimage' in SUSPENDED SENTENCES: Three Novellas by Patrick Modiano, translated from the French (France) by Mark Polizzotti, 1988-1993 en français / collected and translated novellas in English, 2014 by @yalebooks
Three novellas : Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin ~ gathered here as a sample of style for the 2014 Nobel Laureate.
Modiano writes a post-war Paris that is shrouded in mist and cigarette smoke, heavy with memory and nostalgia. These stories (and reportedly his novels that I haven't read yet) rely on this same atmosphere, of a city that exists in Modiano's memory.
'Afterimage' follows a nameless young man who is archiving a famous photographer's work. Common subjects, mysterious faces, and a photographer who wants to leave it all behind. 'Suspended Sentences' tells of two young brothers and their living arrangements while their bohemian parents travel. 'Flowers of Ruin' starts with a grisly crime and then moves into a meditation on the city and various people.
Modiano has characterized his own novels as "a kind of autobiography, but one that is dreamed-up, or imaginary." ...so fuzzy edges... Playing with time and memory like another well-known Frenchmen so delicately does - invoking the Proustian label!
There's a diaphonous quality to the writing, and it mesmerized me as a reader. The first two novellas landed well for me, while the third meandered a little much for me. Still, a great introduction to this writer - someone I hope to return to again soon.
