A REMEMBRANCE of THINGS PAST
A modern-day Proust gives us three tales of longing and a Paris we’ll always have
“Suspended Sentences” by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti; Yale University Press (215 pages, $16)
W hen Patrick Modiano won the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature in October — while many Americans took to Google to find out who he is — several publishing houses began planning editions of his work. With more than 30 books in France, Modiano is relatively unknown outside his homeland and virtually unheard of, and until now unpublished in the United States.
The prize, as much a political and cultural branding exercise as an honor for great writing, will surely guarantee a spike in sales, and with dozens of works yet to translate, we can count on a deluge of translations.
But what of the work? Of the few Modiano titles available stateside so far is “Suspended Sentences,” a triptych of interrelated novellas set in and around Paris.
Recently published in English by Margellos World Republic of Letters, a division of Yale University Press, the work is a series of mnemonic detective stories in which — due to the fleeting nature of circumstance and memory — the mystery remains always unsolved, unsolvable.
The opening story, “Afterimage,” follows the recollections of a writer in later life as he looks back on a youthful apprenticeship to a mercurial photographer. In “Suspended Sentences,” the title story, two castoff elementary-school children board with a ragged crew of their parents’ ne’er-do-well friends.
The last of the three, “Flowers of Ruin,” again finds an older narrator recalling a college friendship with a shadowy character, this time a possible concentration-camp survivor with a criminal past.
Quoted in the foreword to the book, Modiano says the stories “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.”
What recurs most palpably is the city of Paris, which we are walked through with the characters in great detail, many times. “My memory dredged up a few outdated names,” reads one such passage, “Estrapade, Contrescarpe, Tournefort, Pot-de-Fer … I felt apprehensive crossing through places where I hadn’t set foot since I was eighteen, when I attended lycee on the Montaigne-Sainte-Genevieve.” There is a deep textural affection in Modiano’s repetitive mappings of the quartiers — like tracing the lines of a lover’s body — but without a rather intimate familiarity with Paris, the names are little more than entries in a Gallic gazetteer (which could partly explain why the work has not made it much beyond the borders of France).
Modiano’s writing can be lovely, as in the description of an impromptu curbside cocktail party, complete with armchairs and glass tumblers. But the presiding mood music in the stories is a diffuse longing — bordering on nostalgia — for the poignancy of things past.
There is little so elegiac as the recollection from a distance of many years the feeling of life’s early potential. Such sentiments can be cheaply evocative, and unless done subtly and elegantly, can venture toward maudlin.
To wit, with a fair regularity the reader runs across gauzy sentences like, “It called to mind a part of my life so distant that I could barely relate it to the present. I ended up wondering if I was really the child who used to come here with his father.”
If you’re thinking, “Decent, but he’s no Proust,” Peter Englund, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, would disagree. In fact, in awarding the prize, he called Modiano “a Marcel Proust of our time.” At least as far as “Suspended Sentences” goes, that’s an encomium too far.