Haunting tales

Lead review: A translation of Nobel Prize-winner Patrick Modiano's stories, 'Suspended Sentences' comprises astute observations on old Paris.

There are many adjectives you can use to describe the fiction of French novelist Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Elusive” is often among them. “Timely” rarely is.

Yet, after the terrorist attacks in Paris recently, it’s impossible to read Suspended Sentences, a collection of three novellas issued in English for the first time, without comprehending one primal aspect of Modiano’s work: the way he pays complicated, elegiac and almost ghostly tribute to his native city.

Suspended Sentences is among other things, as its translator, Mark Polizzotti, writes in his introduction, “a three-part love song to a Paris that no longer exists, or that most people’s eyes do not see.” After a rainstorm, one character walks through “a city sluiced out and laden with promise.” These novellas are haunted by old buildings, old songs, forgotten neighbourhoods, vanished lovers, lost friends.

Suspended Sentences further reminds us of Modiano’s close interest in anti-Semitism in France, and in the lingering aftershocks of the Nazi occupation.

Modiano likes to say that he is always writing the same book. His fiction is often loosely autobiographical, and each of the novellas in Suspended Sentences touches upon details from the life of his Jewish father, who was arrested after refusing to wear the yellow star in occupied Paris.

He was sent to the transit camp at Drancy, a layover for many who were destined for Auschwitz. Modiano’s father was an amoral black-market racketeer with Nazi connections; he managed to escape that fate.

The novellas in Suspended Sentences were written between 1988 and 1993. In France, initially, they were published separately. Yet they cohere in tone, and intertwine in manners both physical and metaphysical.

In each, the narrator is a writer. All three are tone poems of a sort; all three are about memory. In the first, Afterimage, the narrator searches for the truth about a Magnum photographer named Jansen who pulls a slow fade from his own existence, like a Polaroid left in the sun.

The second, Suspended Sentences, is a jouncing series of childhood memories about a boy who, while his parents are away for many months, is raised by a gaggle of free spirits, one a former circus performer. The third, Flowers of Ruin, is about a prewar murder mystery, and also about the bewildered narrator’s pursuit of a man who, like Jansen (and like the narrator’s father) appears to have simply dematerialised.

Modiano writes clear, languid and urbane sentences in Polizzotti’s agile translation, yet his fiction has a distant quality, as if you were hearing about its incidents from one room over. On a single page, you will find phrases like “vague reference points”, “hazy silhouettes” and “lost their consistency.” Memory here is a stock made from mingled old bones.

Suspended Sentences does not strike me as a major work, nor the best place to fling oneself into Modiano’s oeuvre. (That place, for English readers, is probably Missing Person, from 1978, an existential noir about a detective with memory loss.) But these novellas have a mood. They cast a spell, one that I was mostly happy to submit to.

They are wittier than you might imagine. Jansen, the Magnum photographer, is given to grumpy, gnomic utterances like “Goddamn spring.” These become a kind of comedy. They put me in mind of two lines from a Donald Barthelme short story: “See the moon? It hates us.”

Modiano has ties to France’s music and film worlds. He’s written song lyrics for Françoise Hardy. With Louis Malle, he did the screenplay for Malle’s film Lacombe, Lucien (1974), and he’s written a book with Catherine Deneuve. His mother had a role in Godard’s 1964 movie Band of Outsiders. In one novella here, the narrator recalls about certain movies, “It seems to me that the clouds, sun, and shadows of my 20th year miraculously live on in those films.”

I mention the author’s interest in film because, if the first and last pieces in this collection are Bergman-esque to a greater or lesser degree, the title novella, the best of the three, recalls Fellini’s Amarcord (1974), an episodic, carnivalesque and ribald portrait of a boy’s life in a seaside town.

In this novella, the narrator is 10. His mother “was acting in her play somewhere in North Africa” while his father is “in Brazzaville or Bangui, or somewhere farther still.” He and his brother have been left with his parents’ wild, bohemian friends.

The excellent details pile up. The grave, and perhaps the former house, of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin is nearby. The narrator asks, neglecting the fact that this doctor didn’t actually invent the guillotine, “Was it where he’d perfected his device for severing heads?” The narrator is often referred to, by his guardians, as “blissful idiot.”

He and his brother get into scrapes. They love how one of the women they live with scandalised their town’s bourgeois sensibilities by appearing in “riding breeches with boots, blouses with puffy sleeves drawn tight at the wrists, black ski pants, or even a bolero jacket encrusted with mother-of-pearl.”

One of these women has green eyes. Modiano has a thing about eyes. In this book, when they are not green they are “transparent” or “limpid” or “periwinkle” or some other scintillating tint. It’s enough to make one’s ordinary brown eyes blue.

This novella slides back and forth in time. Its narrator, grown older, recalls old buildings, power outages, Laurel and Hardy movies, Christmas presents wrapped in silver paper. Modiano rarely dabbles in mere nostalgia. He is obsessed with what we take away from our pasts and what we leave behind. And perhaps most important, with what we only think we’ve left behind.

Few American readers were familiar with Modiano’s fiction when he won the Nobel. He was a blip on almost no one’s radar screen in the United States, save the publisher David R Godine, which had issued several of his books. Most of Modiano’s roughly 30 works (novels, plays, children’s books) have yet to be translated into English.

This is rapidly changing. Those who pick up Suspended Sentences will discover an author who frequently seems a flâneur of consciousness, strolling purposefully through Paris’s cache of memories as well as his own.

It was no surprise to learn that, when his daughter called to tell him he had won the Nobel Prize, he was walking down a street. “I was a bit surprised,” Modiano said, “so I continued walking.”