War and the ones we love
In the closing pages of The Black Notebook, 2014 Nobel-laureate Patrick Modiano’s newest translated work, the narrator, Jean, remarks: “Since my youth — and even my childhood — I had done nothing but walk, always in the same streets, to the point where time had become transparent.”
The line could well have been spoken by any Modiano narrator from the twentyplus novels he’s published over the last five decades — or, for that matter, by Modiano himself — and contains the essence of the archetypal Modiano plot: A young man, soon to become a writer, finds himself mixed up with some shady characters and in love with a mysterious woman, whose disappearance compels him, in later life, to hunt his memory for answers as to the meaning of it all, answers that are never wholly forthcoming.
Such is the case with The Black Notebook, which sees Jean, an aging author, revisiting with the aid of the eponymous journal, the few short months he spent with Dannie, a beautiful but troubled young woman he meets at Cité Universitaire — though neither are students — and who introduces him to Aghamouri, an enigmatic Moroccan, and a group of thuggish Frenchmen, who hang about the Unic Hôtel in the Montparnasse neighbourhood of Paris.
But this is France of the early 1960s, where, in the wake of the Algerian War of Independence, suspicion reigns and surveillance is commonplace and soon enough, Jean finds himself unwittingly caught up in a police investigation.
Modiano has written variations of this story before — After the Circus, Paris Nocturne, Out of the Dark — yet the sameness of his novels does nothing to diminish their import. Individually each is, like The Black Notebook, a compelling existential quasi-mystery. Taken as a whole, they represent a powerful examination of individual guilt and responsibility. Stephen Finucan is a Toronto novelist and short story writer.