Patrick Modiano: “Invisible Ink” (2021)
With not even 150 pages, Patrick Modiano’s latest novel to be translated, Encre sympathique (Gallimard, 2019), is a very quick read indeed. As with so many of the French works that I have turned to in recent times, including other works by Modiano, it too was read in the German translation: Unsichtbare Tinte (trans. by Elisabeth Edl).
And a fine and evocative read it is. Modiano’s reflection upon time and memory is as always exquisite. And as always, people, things, situations disappear and fade over time, but are always lurking there in the crevices of unconscious thought, ready to be awakened and hauled into the present – to be then something other than that which they once were. Or as one thought, for who’s to say just how precise any memory is to the actuality of an event? And who (or what) defines the actual, anyway?
In a search to fill all the empty spaces in a life, the novel’s narrator struggles against the unreliability of his own memories and motivations, and he struggles against the forgetting – which is not quite the same thing as the not remembering. And that has been the life work of his creator; Patrick Mondiano’s gift to his country and the world: all his stories of occupied and post-war Paris and France; often heavy but written with a lightness of being, sometimes dark but uncompromising in demanding of a reader the same degree of reflection and moral fortitude with which he writes.
There is a plot – a mystery, detective story of sorts (explained well in this review at The Spectator) – and it is the scaffolding that supports, holds together, all the fragmentary memories as they traverse time and take us with them; speaking to us from a present back some thirty odd years with some stops in-between, and with the promise of an “end” in the here and now. There is, this time at least, some light at the end of the tunnel.
Mysterious, I said; and that’s what so entrances me when I am reading Modiano: a moodiness, a haziness; as if something not quite tangible is always looming close, never to be wholly captured. (I transgress! I imagine myself now in a smoke-filled Parisian jazz club in the fifties or sixties! Though, in his Nobel Prize lecture, when Modiano speaks of his envy of music being better able to encapsulate the essence of a moment as a continuity of thought and experience, he makes reference to Chopin’s nocturnes – also, to be played in the late hours under the muted light of a different sort of venue I could imagine.) Some may find his style old-fashioned, and I have heard it said that he has only one story that he retells over, and over again, albeit beautifully so. But I disagree, well, not on the last said – I do very well appreciate the unique stylistic elements of Modiano’s writing and his identifiable voice – but only a very superficial consideration could be so dismissive. Yes, perhaps the time frame and the way he approaches that, and Paris, of course, are constants, but I actually feel the ageing of this writer, and not in a negative way, rather I admire how the years affect his retrospection – on other generations and the societies in which they interacted with – and that look is not static. What he has, is an absolute integrity, a commitment to using the power of his pen, his words, to ward off the insidious human tendency of forgetting that which shouldn’t.
As I write, there is another new work from Patrick Modiano, published by Gallimard, again of novella length, and one can imagine translations will be available in a timely fashion.