Play Book Tag discussion

I always go pick up that photograph – traces left by an ephemeral moment when a person was happy, taking an afternoon stroll in the sun ...

Patrick Modiano writes the way Alain Resnais makes movies.
Echoes of L’annee derniere a Marienbad can be heard on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, where a young man named Jean is looking for traces of his long lost love, a woman named Sylvie who for him will always represent hot summer days and lazy afternoons making love in a cheap hotel room.
Then she disappears and the man is trapped in Nice, a stranger in a strange town, lost in time and in memories of a season of Sundays even when winter rains come down on its boulevards.

All around me men and women, stiff as mummies, drank their tea in silence, eyes fixed on the Promenade des Anglais. Maybe they, too, were on the lookout for silhouettes from their past amid this crowd passing before their eyes.

And those notes from the piano, always the same ones ... It was raining on the Promenade des Anglais.
“Great atmosphere they’ve got here,” Neal remarked.

This is a crime novel, but the casual reader, one unfamiliar with the French nouveau vague in arthouse cinema, could be excused for wondering into what kind of weird space he has stepped, like Alice through her looking glass? Emotion trumps exposition and time is circular, delimiting a prison for a soul lost inside a labyrinth of his own making.

French critics call this une histoire fantome , one of the hallmarks of Patrick Modiano that makes his novels instantly recognisable by the habitual reader who has strolled before down these rainy, misty and dark landscapes of a past that is irretrievably lost.

Les romans de Patrick Modiano sont traversés par le thème de l'absence, de « la survie des personnes disparues, l’espoir de retrouver un jour ceux qu'on a perdus dans le passé », avec le goût de l'enfance trop vite effacée.

For Jean, a young photographer who once planned to publish a book about the abandoned swimming pools in the environs of Paris, the lost innocence is linked with La Varenne, near the river Marne, the place where in another summer, in another time, he has met the mysterious Sylvie, a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage.
After a torrid illicit affair, the lovers eventually arrive in Nice, where they live as outlaws, in hiding from the woman’s husband, who might be motivated by more than jalousie in the hunt for his runaway wife. La Croix du Sud is a huge and priceless diamond that Sylvie was wearing around her neck. The stone had a long history of misfortune for its owners but for the lovers it represents not a curse but their only chance to escape and to make a future together.

I was fooling myself. I didn’t know yet that this city was a morass, that I was getting stuck in it, little by little.

All of these details will be eventually revealed in the book’s non-linear plot that starts with a casual meeting years after the events of the summer of love, when a drifting Jean comes across the former husband of Sylvie who is as clueless about the present whereabouts of the missing woman as himself. Yet this meeting from the first chapter is the catalyst that brings the past into sudden focus once again for Jean.

“A case of revenants.”
“Revenants?”
“Yes, back from the dead. You’ll see.”

Is Sylvie dead then? Or has she betrayed her lover and run away with the precious stone? What role did the wealthy American expatriates that befriended them in a restaurant played in the dissapearance? These questions have held Jean captive for years in the bright city on the French Riviera, the last place where Sylvie was a burning reality in his arms. He is not any closer to an answer in the current rainy season. Maybe there is no answer and he has become just another mummy or automaton, drinking his tea devoid of any sort of thrill on the Promenade des Anglais, hoping against hope that a familiar silhouette will once again pass by his table.

“Don’t you feel like this is all a dream?”
She smiled at me but looked nervous.
“And you’re afraid that at some point we’ll wake up?” she asked me.

Some unkind reader might call this style of storytelling the triumph of style over substance. I’m in the opposite camp: I like to work at the mystery, to try to fit the pieces of the puzzle into something that makes sense instead of being led by the hand and having everything spelled out to me by the author.
Modiano leaves behind enough clues about what is going on. He just dislikes linear narration and prefers a game of shadows and cryptic utterances to shining a bright analytical light on his criminal cases.

“Nice is a dangerous town,” he said. “You meet some bad people here ...”

A big part of Jean’s amateur detective efforts are focused on the identity of Virgil Neale, an American living in a luxury villa and claiming embassy connections. Neale and his wife insinuated themselves into the lives of the secretive young lovers and eventually promised to arrange a buyer for the cursed diamond.
Sylvie was in the Neales company when last seen.
The only physical proof that Jean has to demonstrate that the Neales are real and not a figment of his imagination is a candid photo taken by a street photographer. Yet physical evidence is apparently not enough to pull Jean back from his dream world and into the present time. His own ideas about photography as art are seen as a sort of premonitory warning of his impending doom. La Varenne, despite its summer sunshine, is the place where he lost his youth, his innocence, his love. And all because of a cursed illusion of wealth.

“I can tell you are a sensitive young man who picks up on the atmosphere of a place, and that you understand what I’m saying. Make your photographs as black as possible.”
“I’ll try.”

Others before us had fought for it, others to come would wear it around their neck for a time, or on their finger, and it would traverse the centuries, hard and indifferent to the passing of time and the deaths of those it would leave behind. No, our anxiety didn’t come from our contact with that cold stone with glints of blue – it doubtless came from life itself.

You can probably tell from my review that I am a fan of Patrick Modiano and of his ability to imply more with less words than many a crime or fiction writer. I hope to move more of his books from the TBR to the ‘finished’ shelf.