New England Review

Patrick Modiano published his first book, the novel La Place de l’Étoile, in the spring of 1968, a few months before his twenty-third birthday. In 2017, he published two books, an autofiction and a play, his forty-first and forty-second books. He enjoyed early and constant success in France, and many of his books have been translated into other European languages. He has won major French and European prizes including the Grand Prix du Roman from the French Academy, the Prix Goncourt, and the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. He is widely accepted in France as the great novelist of the Occupation, but when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, he was almost unknown in the United States. New translations and the reissue of older ones are beginning to make his distinctive evocation of the past available to readers of English.

Anyone who has spent a little time walking in central Paris is likely to have encountered racks of postcards—sometimes clustered around the entrance to a bookstore—showing black-and-white photographs of street scenes from the city’s past. Some of these photographs have become classic evocations of a Paris that now exists only in images and imagination; they continue, however, to attract the attention of people who never experienced the Paris of the postcard photographs directly. They encourage viewers to penetrate beneath the surface of the present city by imagining a city of the past.

An engagement with a past that is not quite our own—the world as it was just before we were born—is characteristic of Patrick Modiano’s novels and part of their appeal. His books can prompt the same kind of emotion as the photographs on the postcards—a yearning to know more about the lives that were lived in the streets, the houses, the cafés of the photographs and how they relate to our own. Modiano evokes places and times, especially Paris during the Occupation and in the 1960s, with careful attention to what might seem to be banal details, because to him these details form a surface layer that obscures something meaningful and precious. His major subject is the tenacity across space and time of connections to a disrupted world—a world that survives in disordered fragments. His novels are haunted by the past and by the precarious links we have to the people and places that have contributed to who we have [End Page 72] become and then have left our lives. His characters are haunted by loss, missed connections, and the aura of places that seem to speak to them. The narrator of the first section of Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue (2007), says, “I have always believed that certain places are magnets and that you are drawn towards them if you walk in their vicinity. And this in a manner completely imperceptible, without your even imagining it.”¹

We are drawn to these places, Modiano suggests, because once their surface is penetrated, the mysteries that shape our lives might be laid bare. But the fragments that remain never lead to a coherent understanding of how the past has contributed to the present. They lead instead to individual lives lived in the present—lives that interpret these fragments by lending them a living imagination. Modiano, who was born after the Occupation, speaks as if he had lived through it.

An unfamiliar city, this Paris of the Occupation. On the surface, life continued “just as before” . . . But ominous details told us that Paris was no longer the same as before. . . . Adults and children could disappear from one minute to the next without leaving a trace, and even among friends everyone spoke furtively, and the conversations were never frank because people felt a sense of menace in the air.²

Some of Modiano’s novels have been compared to detective fiction, especially Rue des boutiques obscures (1978)³, whose narrator, a private detective himself, tries to recover his own lost identity, but the mysteries Modiano addresses are mysteries that cannot be solved...