Night is falling when the girl leaves her dance class at the Théâtre du Châtelet. It’s late afternoon, the cusp of December, 1941—the darkest month coming to close out what has been, for Paris, a very dark year. The anxieties and privations of the Occupation gnaw at the city. Winter is sure to be bitter.
For the past few months, the girl has lived with her father in a shabby hotel on the Boulevard Ornano, a street that slices behind the blanched dome of the Sacré-Cœur to end just before the city does, at the Eighteenth Arrondissement’s northern limit. He is Austrian-born, registered as a Jew. So far, he’s been able to keep his job at the medical clinic where he works, though the doctor who protected him has fled to Montpellier, in the free zone.
The girl, who is called Ingrid Teyrsen, is sixteen but looks older. The Métro is crowded and stuffy, and she decides to get off a few stops early. It’s five-thirty now. At six, a curfew will go into effect in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, a response to an attack carried out on German soldiers there. Armed men cluster near the mouth of the Métro, ready to seal off the neighborhood. As Ingrid walks along the south side of the Boulevard de Rochechouart, which falls in the Ninth Arrondissement, looking across the street to where the Eighteenth begins, she finds that she can’t bring herself to cross that invisible frontier. It is six, then ten past.
It was as if she had jumped from a sinking ship just in time. She didn’t want to think about her father because she still felt too close to that dark, silent zone from which no one would ever be able to escape now. For her part, she had only just managed it.
She no longer felt the sense of suffocation that had come over her in the métro, and a little while before at the Barbès-Rochechouart crossroads at the sight of the motionless soldiers and policemen. It seemed to her that the avenue opening out in front of her was a big forest path which led, farther on, to the west, to the sea whose spray the wind was already blowing in her face.
This passage is from “Honeymoon,” a novel by Patrick Modiano, the French writer who won last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1988, two years before its publication, he had come across a missing-persons notice in a copy of the newspaper Paris-Soir from December, 1941. Perusing old documents is a preferred activity of Modiano’s. Yellowing newspapers sold by bouquinistes along the Seine; address books filled with now obscure names that must be soothed and prodded, like piano keys stiff from disuse, into revealing their true notes; school-enrollment registers and records of the arrests and deportations and births of people long dead, painstakingly obtained through bureaucratic supplication: these provide the factual seedbed of his fiction.
It is a fiction of hints and intimations, of traces collected in pursuit of the involuntarily disappeared as well as of the willingly vanished—the account of the mysteries investigated, if not exactly solved, by a distinctly unsavage detective. “I’m trying to search for clues,” he writes of his method. That “trying” gives the project a melancholy cast. Modiano was born, near Paris, on July 30, 1945, a date that is as firm yet arbitrary a boundary as the one that separated the open Ninth Arrondissement from the closed Eighteenth on a winter night nearly four years before. The Americans arrived in Paris the previous August; had he been born a year earlier, his life would have touched the poisoned terrain of the Occupation. But he wasn’t, and that narrow escape set him searching for his counterparts—people like the subject of the Paris-Soir notice, who had found themselves thrust up against the other side of the dividing line.
Her name was Dora Bruder. According to the paper, she was sixteen, a bit over five feet tall, with an “oval-shaped face, gray-brown eyes, gray sports jacket, maroon pullover, navy blue skirt and hat, brown gym shoes.” Anyone with information about her was asked to contact M. and Mme. Bruder, at 41 Boulevard Ornano. Modiano had spent time in the neighborhood as a child in the fifties, going to the flea markets with his mother, and again as a young man, haunting the cafés. “Perhaps, though not yet fully aware of it, I was following the traces of Dora Bruder and her parents,” he wrote later.
Modiano tracked down records and addresses; he gathered photographs and letters; he talked with a cousin of Dora’s. He found out that she was the only child of Ernest Bruder, a Viennese-born Jew and disabled laborer, and Cécile Burdej, a Jewish seamstress from Hungary. Though Ernest had registered himself and his wife in the census of 1940, the first in France in almost seventy years to ask about religion, he hadn’t registered Dora. She was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school on the other side of the city, and it was from there that she ran away in December of 1941.
Novelists are compulsive as a breed, and Modiano is an exceptionally compulsive novelist. He has come out with a book every couple of years or so since 1968, and though a few, like “Honeymoon,” have been quietly available in English for some time, a harvest of new translations has just arrived: his three earliest novels, grouped together as “The Occupation Trilogy” (Bloomsbury), as well as his most recent, “So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), plus a memoir, “Pedigree” (Yale). By early next year, nearly twenty of his books will be in print here. Such a sudden bounty should, by all rights, lead to writer fatigue, but Modiano is an ideal writer to gorge on, in part because his books are airy and short—generally a hundred and fifty pages at the most, hypnotically carried along by sentences built simply enough to survive their hurried journeys into English—and in part because they make up a system as beguiling and complete as any in contemporary literature. Again and again, he returns to the same names and places and events, “patterns,” as he says, “on a tapestry woven while half asleep.” Laced together by their internal repetitions, the books echo and contradict and amplify one another until they come to seem like a single work.
Modiano’s driving compulsion is the need to know—to dig up information long concealed or lost. If that urge has obvious moral implications when applied to France’s murky memory of its wartime complicity, it is born from an impulse more primal than the ethical one. “I know the life stories of these shadows is of no great interest to anyone, but if I didn’t write it down, no one else would do it,” says the narrator of “Ring Roads,” his third novel. (A muted first person is Modiano’s standard fictional uniform.) The shadows in question are a group of rotten war profiteers, shown in mottled, impassive closeup. There’s the blackmailing newspaperman desperately afraid of going broke; the high-riding coquette who got her start as a girl rented out to passengers on overnight trains; the brutish legionnaire, a black marketeer and Jew-hater, who is imagined on his return to Paris after his posting in Morocco: “He was terrified of crossing the street, and in a blind panic on the Place de l’Opéra, asked a policeman to take his hand and lead him across.” That flash of human frailty gives weight to the novelist’s beautiful lie—that he is reporting on people who exist beyond the boundaries of his invention.
As he slowly pieced together the story of Dora Bruder, Modiano took a shortcut through fiction and wrote “Honeymoon,” designating the character of Ingrid as Dora’s double. His own stand-in, Jean, is an “explorer,” a maker of documentaries about exotic places. Instead of going to Brazil to shoot his next film, he hides from his wife at a cheap hotel to contemplate more ephemeral quarry. In the sixties, as a young drifter, Jean had met a couple, Rigaud and Ingrid, who lived modestly on the Riviera. He was drawn to their generosity, and to Ingrid’s cryptic insouciance. At night, as neighbors approached the house to invite them to a party, she and Rigaud turned off all the lights. “ ‘We’ll pretend to be dead,’ ” she had explained. “ ‘There are moments when we are incapable of exchanging a single word with anybody . . . . ’ ”
An impenetrable world is hidden in that ellipsis. Some years later, Jean learned that Ingrid had committed suicide; the puzzle of her life has come to obsess him. The matter of memory is organized, by the whim of association, into its own private sequences, and “Honeymoon,” smoothly translated by Barbara Wright, follows the same logic, opening with Jean’s discovery of Ingrid’s death and weaving back and forth through time to lead up to his speculation of what might have happened to her during the war—the root, he suspects, of her attraction to disappearance. He pictures her tightrope-like walk along the border of the Ninth Arrondissement, and her panic when she realizes that she can’t go home. In a café, a young man in a threadbare jacket smiles at her: Rigaud. They are bound in an instant by instinctive trust. Ingrid is vulnerable as both a minor and a Jew, and so they go into hiding—their “honeymoon”—in a Mediterranean beach town. Before she leaves Paris, she slips back to the Boulevard Ornano to see her father. He put an ad in the newspaper to find her, she learns: Ingrid Teyrsen, sixteen, a bit over five feet tall, “oval face, grey eyes.” Then he was taken by the police.
This is a triply layered fiction. Modiano imagines Jean, Jean imagines Ingrid, and, through Ingrid, Modiano tries to glimpse what he can of Dora—“a place where she had been, a detail of her life.” Turning to invention to get at deeper realities of experience is fiction’s righteous mission, and “Honeymoon” performs it beautifully. But truthfulness isn’t the same as the truth. Why had Dora run away? She had a rebellious nature, Modiano learned from her cousin. As for life at school, he could imagine that himself: the sinister nuns, the tedious prayers, the oppressive silence. But he kept returning to the question of where Dora had gone when she left, and how she had spent her time.
Modiano staged his own escape from boarding school at the age of fourteen. He had lived away from home since he was a child, not because his parents wanted to protect him but because they didn’t care enough to try. “I’m a dog who pretends to have a pedigree,” he announces in “Pedigree,” his memoir of his early life, published in France when he was nearly sixty. His mother was (in Mark Polizzotti’s lucid translation) “a pretty girl with an arid heart”: Louisa Colpeyn, a Flemish actress who came to Paris during the war to work for a German-controlled film-production company and settled into a career of bit parts, travelling with the theatre and neglecting her sons. When Patrick was six and Rudy, his brother, four, she sent them to live with a friend in Jouy-en-Josas, a town on the outskirts of Paris. “Strange women came and went,” Modiano recalls, women who wore men’s clothes and drove American cars and worked in night clubs. The stay came to an abrupt end when the friend was arrested for burglary. There was never any money, and Louisa leaned relentlessly on Patrick for support. At twenty-four, still susceptible to her demands, he went with her to hock a gold pen presented to him at a literary-awards ceremony: “They gave me only two hundred francs for it, which my mother pocketed, steely-eyed.”
Modiano’s parents had met during the war and separated shortly after it ended. Alberto Modiano grew up in Paris; on his paternal side, he came from a Jewish family with roots in Tuscany. (His mother was French.) During the Occupation, he traded on the black market under a variety of aliases, doing business with people mixed up with the Gestapo. Collaboration, in Alberto’s case, was an ironic necessity: he hadn’t registered himself as a Jew, or as anything else, and, while his lack of legal identity helped to shield him from deportation, it also barred him from legitimate work. He had circulated in the criminal underworld since he was in his teens, and spent his life conducting a tangle of unprofitable business dealings with a band of shady associates, thugs and thieves who presented themselves as if ready-made for his son’s fiction.
Alberto was hardly a warmer parent than Louisa. In one harrowing episode, Patrick, fourteen years old and stranded alone in London, desperately collect-calls Alberto, “who wishes me good luck, in an indifferent voice.” The cruelty seems all the greater considering that Alberto, by then, had only one child; Rudy had died at the age of nine, a loss that devastated Patrick. But where Modiano hardens his heart against his selfish mother, he is preoccupied with the riddle of his father. He senses that Alberto’s quest for wealth and status was rooted in the Occupation: “He never told me what he had felt, deep inside, in Paris during that period. Fear? The strange sensation of being hunted simply because someone had classified him as a specific type of prey, when he himself didn’t really know what he was?”
In the spring of 1965, Louisa, “foaming at the mouth,” sent Patrick to Alberto’s apartment to collect a child-support payment he owed her. Alberto slammed the door in his son’s face; his shrewish girlfriend called the police. Together, father and son were taken to the station in a caged van so that Alberto could press charges against the “hooligan.”
The trip was a perverse reprise of one that Alberto had made in February of 1942, when he was picked up during a sweep by the Jewish Affairs police, a terrifyingly close call. If Alberto made the connection, he said nothing, an especially keen injustice, Modiano felt, since “I had embarked on a book—my first—in which, putting myself in his shoes, I relived his feelings of distress during the Occupation.” While Alberto turned to the law to sever himself from Patrick, Patrick turned to literature to make common cause with Alberto: “I wanted my first book to be a riposte to all those who, by insulting my father, had wounded me. And, on the terrain of French prose, to silence them once and for all.”
That book, “La Place de l’Étoile” (1968), appears in “The Occupation Trilogy.” Its title is a dark pun: if, during the war, you asked a Jew where the Place de l’Étoile was, he could either point to the nimbus of streets circling the Arc de Triomphe, one of them housing Gestapo headquarters, or to the yellow star on his chest. The Jew in question is the pointedly named Raphäel Schlemilovitch, a tubercular intellectual and playboy who restlessly zips through his historical acid trip of a life. He beds Eva Braun and gets analyzed by Freud, sells pure-blooded French girls into sex slavery and enlists in the Gestapo for a lark. The lustful, conniving Schlemilovitch, in other words, is an impish amalgam of anti-Semitic tropes, and if Modiano intended his book as an assault on French memory—still blocked, two decades after the war, where Vichy’s persecution of French Jews was concerned—he also meant to mock his country’s literary arbiters, willing to open their club to the distinguished token Jew but not to the unfettered Jewish id. “They had expected better manners from a Jew,” Schlemilovitch thinks, after staging a play in which, among other things, a son wearing an S.S. uniform tries to choke his skullcapped father:
I’m an ungrateful wretch. A boor. I have appropriated their clear and limpid language and transformed it into a hysterical cacophony.
They had hoped to discover a new Proust, a rough-hewn Yid polished by contact with their culture, they came expecting sweet music only to be deafened by ominous tom-toms. Now they know where they stand with me. I can die happy.
The same sentiment could apply to a book published the following year, equally intent on rejecting notions of good Jews and good sons: “Portnoy’s Complaint.” But where Alexander Portnoy’s neuroses and sexual antics marked him as a new kind of American, Raphäel Schlemilovitch’s exploits put him in a cultural no man’s land. “I am not a son of France,” he says, but he’s not a son of Israel, either. When he goes there, the Sabras are disgusted by his European cosmopolitanism and send him straight back to the Continent.
Modiano never wrote another book like “La Place de l’Étoile.” That’s a good thing. The novel burns out on the high heat of its own aspiration; its frenetic, syncopated style is as deafening as that of Schlemilovitch’s play. (You want to applaud the translator, Frank Wynne, for sheer endurance.) Mugging as Schlemilovitch allowed Modiano to blast through the noxious fog of stereotypes his father had had to contend with, but it didn’t help him get closer to understanding the man himself. In his next novel, “The Night Watch” (1969), Modiano approached Alberto from a subtler angle. His narrator, a young man recruited by a gang of collaborators to spy on a Resistance cell, and then by the cell to spy on the collaborators, does his best to suspend his conscience in the interest of staying alive, even as he grows increasingly repulsed by the moral blight he helps spread.
It was in his third book, “Ring Roads” (1972), that Modiano set his course as a novelist. Rather than write from a perspective aligned with Alberto’s, as he had previously done, Modiano decided instead to write as a son in search of his father—to impersonate himself. Serge Alexandre, the narrator, hasn’t seen his father, Chalva Deyckecaire, in years, and doesn’t know what’s become of him. He imagines travelling back in time to befriend Deyckecaire during the war, before he was born—a Jew without identity papers, trying to remain useful to the black marketeers whose favor he depends on for his survival. Deyckecaire isn’t the kinetic showoff of Modiano’s first novel or the moral dilettante of his second, but a quiet man, painfully awkward, observed by his son with a yearning flecked with contempt:
He gave a faint smile, more a tremor of the lips, as though afraid of being hit, and I pitied him. This feeling I had always experienced with regard to him, which caused a burning pain in my gut.
That is Modiano the son, at once moved and repulsed by the intimation of his father’s weakness. And that, too, is Modiano the writer, at home at last in the “clear and limpid language” so despised by his own Schlemilovitch before he had learned that silence was a medium more conducive to mystery than noise was.
Memory is a mutable element, fickle in its suggestibility. It can be tricked to expand far beyond its true bounds, and yet, if overburdened, is liable to shut down altogether. Guy Roland, the narrator of “Missing Person,” which appeared in 1978 and is one of Modiano’s finest novels, suffers from this kind of profound forgetting. It’s the mid-sixties; he can’t remember anything that happened to him before the previous decade. He doesn’t even know his real name. The war seems to have something to do with it, but those years are a blank. Guy has been trained as a private detective, and he decides to apply his skill to his own life, working backward to uncover his past. “Is it really my life I’m tracking down?” he wonders. “Or someone else’s into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?”
The pull of buried memory is also at the center of Modiano’s most recent novel, “So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood,” translated by Euan Cameron. Jean Daragane, a reclusive writer in his sixties, gets a telephone call from Gilles Ottolini, a stranger who has found his address book in a train station. He insists on returning it in person: there’s a name in the book that he’s come across while researching a murder that took place decades before, and he wants more information. Daragane explains that he has no memory of the name. Gilles is skeptical, pointing out that Daragane used it for a character in his first novel. But Daragane hardly remembers his first novel, either. Soon, Gilles’s girlfriend, Chantal, a young femme fatale with a husky voice and a small scar on her cheek, calls Daragane and insists that he come to her apartment in secret. She has a dossier of materials on the murder. Could he look it over and see if he can help them?
In short, Modiano has set up a moody, delectable noir. Who are Gilles and Chantal, and how will they worm their way into Daragane’s life? And yet Daragane is drawn to solve a different mystery. Inside the dossier, he finds a copy of a passport photograph of a child from the fifties. The face is his. And he does recognize the name mentioned in one of the documents, Annie Astrand. She was the young woman living in the Paris suburbs in whose care his heedless mother had left him when he was small. Annie, who worked in a nightclub, had taken him to get the passport photo taken. But where were they going? He loved her with the special urgency of an unwanted child. Then she vanished from his life. How?
And so one mystery opens like an estuary onto a greater one, whose solution, if it comes, is sure to lead only to more questions. The same thing happened in “Dora Bruder,” the book that Modiano wrote about his search for the real girl from the Boulevard Ornano. By the time he finally published it, in 1997, he had learned more than he could ever have hoped when he came across the terse newspaper clipping nearly a decade before. In April of 1942, four months after running away, Dora had been found and returned home. By then, her father had been sent to Drancy, an internment camp on the outskirts of Paris; he would have been arrested around the same time as Modiano’s own father. Dora ran away again, and this time was herself sent to Drancy, and then, like both of her parents, to Auschwitz. But the months of her freedom were still a blank, and, by the end of the book, Modiano had resolved that they would stay that way:
I shall never know how she spent her days, where she hid, in whose company she passed the winter months of her first escape, or the few weeks of spring when she escaped the second time. That is her secret. A poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, History, time—everything that defiles and destroys you—have been able to take away from her.
Modiano’s fiction is the art of speculation. He had already used that art on Dora’s behalf, creating, in “Honeymoon,” a character in her image, and sending her to wait out the war with a companion to protect her. But speculation can’t redeem what really happened, just as memory can’t be counted on to explain it. Years ago, Jean Daragane remembers, he had gone to the town where he had lived with Annie to see if he could find any remnants of his life there to include in his first novel. He knocked on the door of the kindly doctor who had cared for him as a boy. He had heard stories about the odd people who lived across the street, he said. Did the doctor remember? Yes, but not very much. He walked with Daragane to the bus station, then took him by the arm: “The best witness could be the child who once lived there. You would need to find him . . . .” We all hold the keys to mysteries of our own making, Modiano tells us. If only we knew where we hid them. ♦
