Three matching gems from a Nobel laureate’s crown
Reviewed by David Herman
There is nothing like winning the Nobel Prize to launch a foreign writer in Britain. Patrick Modiano was little known here and barely translated into English until he won the prize in 2014. Then the floodgates opened. More than a dozen works of his have been translated into English in the past two years, mostly by Yale University Press and MacLehose Press, in smart, handsome editions with excellent translations by Euan Cameron and Mark Polizzotti.
After the Circus was originally published in French in 1992. Like most of Modiano’s work, it is short, under 200
Patrick Modiano displays his 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature medal pages. Set in Paris, the action takes place in the mid-1960s. It traces the relationship between Jean, the young male narrator, and Gisèle, whom he first sees at a police interrogation. Their names are both found in someone else’s address book. They fall in love.
The plot, as often in Modiano, is neither here nor there. What makes the novel distinctive is its atmosphere of mystery and elusiveness. On the one hand, the writing could not be more precise. We are frequently given exact place names and told where the charac- ters are. And yet there is so much about the characters we don’t know and will never find out. It’s like a Maigret novel in which the key information has been deliberately removed. “It was number 14, Rue Raffet,” Jean tells us. “But topographical details have a strange effect on me: instead of clarifying and sharpening images from the past, they give me a harrowing sensation of emptiness and severed relationships.” Exactly.
After the Circus has an abiding sense of puzzlement. Whose address book is it in which Jean and Gisèle both appear? Why does this matter? On several occasions, we are told that her suitcase is heavy but we never find out why. There are various other characters who are strangely sinister but we never find out more about them. Jean’s father’s mysterious friend, Gribley, for example. What exactly is his relationship with Jean’s father? Who is Gisèle’s violent husband?
Jean often asks very direct questions in attempting to find out something about these individuals but the answers are always elusive. Then things take off as if we are suddenly in a thriller. Jean and Gisèle are asked to do a strange errand, which, it seems, has catastrophic consequences for a man they don’t know. But has it? And what happens in the end to Gisèle?
In the Café of Lost Youth (2007) and The Black Notebook (2012) are both more recent and are even shorter, each around 150 pages, and are written in exactly the same style. Both are also set in Paris, with important scenes in mysterious country houses outside the city. They also have a young male narrator, mysterious friends who frequent the same cafés and hotels, and, above all, a strange, attractive young woman at the centre.
All three novels are set in the past but suddenly leap forward into the present. There is always the expectation that a lost manuscript, or black notebook, might provide important clues but this never materialises.
What is left is a constant sense of how people may fall in love but whose lives fail to connect. They have friends but they remain alone. Buried memories never come to the surface.
All we have are clues to lives we and others might have lived. This may sound uninteresting but these three novels are gripping throughout.
These are thrillers without thrills. There are clues but no explanations. Yet each of them is a compelling and beautiful read. David Herman is the JC’s chief fiction reviewer