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This review first appeared in the inaugural issue of Serpent Club Press, New Writing, Summer, 2023 edited by Matthew Gasda and Robert Gittings. You can purchase a copy here: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Summer-2023-Matthew-Gasda/dp/0997613491/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3I1QCNEECL7SO&keywords=serpent+club+new+writing&qid=1702860358&s=books&sprefix=serpent+club+new+writing%2Cstripbooks%2C118&sr=1-1

French author Patrick Modiano celebrated his seventy-eighth birthday this past July. His literary output, beginning in his early twenties, has been prodigious: he has written more than thirty works of fiction, as well as co-written the screenplay for the film Lacombe, Lucien (with director Louis Malle), children’s books, and memoirs. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014 “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies…” Often referred to as existential detective stories, Modiano’s novels are both atmospheric and enigmatic, combining, as poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch has noted, “a detective’s curiosity with an elegist’s melancholy.” 

Despite his Nobel and the availability of his translated work, Modiano is not well known to readers in the United States. One wonders why. Is there a particularly European aspect to his melancholy? Do Americans yawn in the face of memory? In his Nobel speech, Modiano noted that memory “is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion,” and posited that “we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies.” This doesn’t appear to express a particularly European sentiment, but a human one, which is why Modiano situates memory at the center of his work. Reading his novels sensitizes us to a reality we may have only dimly perceived, which is that while we typically think of memories as immutable objects we preserve and cherish throughout our lives, this is not the case. Memories are not immortal: like people and things, they are subject to vanishing, like life itself they fade and die and, in the end, abandon us.

Memory occupies an odd place in our consciousness, somewhere between reality and dream. What our memories hold, how we maintain them, or find them when they seem to have disappeared — and how we verify that they are correct if we find them — are the subjects about which Modiano writes. His protagonists unearth names and dates, they search through old telephone directories and police files, they try to verify addresses, locate pictures, in an effort to construct real or imaginary narratives, generally of people who have gone missing. 

For Modiano the tragedy of human life is that memories are mortal: they degrade over time and disappear, abandoning us just like people. Modiano suggests that loss, abandonment, and the threat of vanishing is the fate we all suffer. For, like his characters, every day we, too, are abandoned: loved ones pass away, children leave home, our significant other leaves us, or we leave them, our memory fails us, our friends unfriend us. His stories, which engage memory on every level, are told without sentimentality or emotion (the lack of which some readers find unnerving) and portray the struggle in which we are all engaged as we work to keep our lives in balance in the face of ongoing losses.  

These ideas are in full bloom in Modiano’s most recent works, The Black Notebook (2016), Invisible Ink (2020), and Scene of the Crime (2023) all admirably translated by Mark Polizzotti. The narrators in these novels are named Jean (which is Modiano’s first name) and rely on jottings in notebooks (a typical Modiano ploy) to aid in their quest of a missing person. In The Black Notebook, Jean revisits his fifty-year-old black notebook in which he had recorded certain events: “a succession of names, phone numbers, appointments, and also short texts that might have something to do with literature” but which portray the aimless, peripatetic life he led in Paris during his early twenties, and his involvement with a mysterious woman named Dannie, who disappeared. In Invisible Ink, Jean steals a black notebook from the room of Noëlle Lefebvre whom he is seeking to locate after her disappearance from Paris thirty years earlier. This notebook, too, contains fragments of information, nothing more than seemingly unrelated pieces of a puzzle that the narrator struggles to put together in his search for the missing woman.

Modiano’s novels are often structured like detective stories and involve the narrator’s search for someone he knew in his youth who had a profound effect upon his life. More often than not, the missing individuals are women. They tend to be distant, fragile, and prone to suicide. Modiano’s male characters are often shady drifters or grifters, or detectives or former detectives, as in Invisible Ink. Both the women and men exist on the periphery of respectable bourgeois society. In The Black Notebook, Jean describes himself as existing outside respectability: “I had no credit, no legitimacy. No family or defined social status. I floated on the Paris air.” In Invisible Ink, Jean appears to be unemployed, possibly a writer, but at one point he says, ironically, he is a history professor.

The Black Notebook revolves around Jean’s attempt to discover what became of Dannie. He describes her as “no more than a spot of light, without relief, as in an overexposed photograph. A blank.” She has no family to speak of, no permanent address, no visible means of support. She associates with a group of “losers” — members of the “Montparnasse gang.” Various members of the gang aid and abet her existence; they procure her a room in the hotel where they meet, allow her the use of a car, and one of them provides her with false identity papers. What she does for them in return is left unsaid.

As in almost all of Modiano’s novels, the setting of The Black Notebook is Paris, the city in which Modiano was born, and the city that continues to fascinate him. Modiano has said that “Themes of disappearance, identity and the passing of time are closely bound up with the topography of cities.” In a city, anyone can disappear if they want to. Anyone can change their identity by adopting an alias. (Dannie goes by several aliases, including Mireille Sampierry, Michèle Aghamouri, and Jeannine de Chillaud. Her real name is Dominique Roger.) Jean and Dannie spend most of their time together, desultorily wandering the streets of Paris. They live in shabby rooms in cheap hotels. They have no place to call home. They exist in the present, seeking to avoid the “menace that hovered over everything.” This menace emanates from the sketchy people with whom they associate, and from the more abstract, but, in its own way, equally perilous bourgeois society, with its stultifying rules and codes of behavior. In some sense, the couple is always on the lam.

Toward the end of The Black Notebook one of the “Montparnasse gang” warns Jean that Dannie was mixed up in something pretty serious, a “nasty incident,” and that she might be held accountable. He won’t reveal what it is. When Jean asks Dannie about it, she says, “Do I really look like someone who’d get involved in a nasty incident?” Reflecting on her response fifty years later, Jean says: “I believe that already, back then, I had understood that no one ever answers questions.”

The story line in Invisible Ink revolves around a notebook that the narrator, Jean Eyben, steals from the room of a woman for whom he has been searching. The woman’s name is Noëlle Lefebvre. She came to Paris thirty years ago, stayed several months, then vanished. Jean was first introduced to her through a “fact sheet,” a scant three paragraphs of data points that his boss gave him to begin the search. Working as a detective (“on a trial basis”) at the Huette Detective Agency at the time, it was his job to find her and establish her true identity, a task at which he failed. Upon leaving the agency he took her case file with him, as a souvenir, and it is to this file that he returns all these years later to attempt to fill in the “blanks” in her case. The details, scant though they are, are sufficient to put the narrative in motion. 

Who is Noëlle Lefebvre? What happened to her? How does this “person of interest” connect to Jean’s life? The story that unfurls seeks to answer these questions, which become increasingly pressing as Jean comes to feel that Noëlle may form a “missing link” in his own life. 

From Huette’s case file and from the notebook he steals from Noëlle’s former apartment, Jean begins to piece together the stray fragments to form a picture of her Parisian existence. We learn about her boyfriend Sancho (real name, Serge) and his Chrysler convertible; a failed actor who went by the name of Gérard Mourade; their flashy friend Brainos and La Marine Dance Club; a poem: “The sky is, above the roof/So calm, so fair!/A branch, above the roof/Fans the air”(which may be, my research has determined, a corrupted partial version of Paul Verlaine’s poem The Sky Above the Roof); and, that she grew up in a small provincial town, Annecy — a town in which the narrator also spent time.  

To solve this case and the mystery of Noëlle’s life Jean must fit together all the pieces of the puzzle he’s accumulated so “that the whole picture might emerge, more or less.” The narration moves backwards and forwards in time as memory and reality reveal new data points about her life. While he feels as if he is making progress, he worries that the details he’s gathered about Noëlle “remind me of the crackling of static in a telephone, growing louder and louder. It keeps you from hearing a voice calling to you from far away.” 

As is the case with many highly accomplished authors who have significant oeuvres, Modiano feels as if he has always been writing the same novel (on fait toujours le même roman) and his most recent work, Scene of the Crime (2023) doesn’t disappoint on that score. As in the previous two novels, this one, too, centers around a notebook, a blue one. While not his most successful work, partially because late in the story (while hinted at earlier), for no necessary reason, we encounter a metafictional twist in which the narrator, Jean Bosmans, who is rather weakly drawn, turns out to be an author himself — of the story we’re reading. 

Drawing from his memory, Bosmans writes a multitude of details in his notebook seeking to find the common thread among them that will help him remember an event he witnessed that happened fifty years in the past. Finding the key that will unlock that memory may involve an overheard phrase, “Guy has just gotten out of prison.” Bosmans knows “he’d been used to living in the narrow margin between reality and dream, letting them illuminate each other, sometimes blend together.” Pursued by three shady characters who want to know what he knows about what happened in a house on Rue du Docteur-Kurzenne, time itself is a bigger worry for Jean because, “Little by little, time had erased the different periods of his life, none of which had a connection with the subsequent one, and as such that life had been only a series of interruptions, avalanches, or even amnesias.” 

Modiano’s protagonists recognize their memories are fragile and ephemeral and that the corrosive effects of time will completely dissolve them. They are always in a rush to locate the “blanks” and “missing links” and different periods of their lives that they hope will substantiate their existence. Like Modiano’s characters we, too, recognize – if only tacitly – that our lives are a series of ongoing “interruptions, avalanches, or even amnesias.” It is this recognition that produces the unique melancholy frisson of pleasure when reading Modiano.

Author note: While this essay has centered around Modiano’s most recent work, for readers interested in experiencing the pleasure of ‘Modiano melancholy’ I might also suggest some of his earlier novels, such as: Missing Person (1978), for which he won the Prix Goncourt, in which a detective suffering from amnesia seeks his own identity; the novel opens with the portentous sentence “I am Nothing”; and, Out of the Dark (1995) in which the narrator takes off from Paris for London after committing a crime at the behest of a mysterious woman named Jacqueline, who is not beyond exchanging sex for money, and who then abandons him in London for another man. Their paths cross years later in Paris and he discovers her real name may be Thérèse Caisley, but after a brief tryst she disappears again without him learning any more about her than the day he met her.  

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