I have just completed reading, and in one sitting – well its pages only number 100 odd! – Patrick Modiano’s Schlafende Erinnerungen. As a matter of convenience I read it in German; in the French original it is titled Souvenirs dormants and in English Sleep of Memory (whereby one could wonder why not “Sleeping Memories” – but that is a thing with memories, we never quite know what to do with them, nor what they do to us!)
This was Modiano’s first work after being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, and I seem to recall at the time the usual disenchantment in the English speaking universe when one of their own misses out (again!). Certainly I didn’t know him at all, but it was apparent that in Germany he had an appreciative readership amongst Francophiles and literati sorts, and his books seem to be constantly in print. I did then read his first novel La Place de l’Étoile, written in 1968 when he was just 22 years old, and was at once perplexed and captivated by the unusual voice (not to mention the subject matter of German occupation and collaboration and where all that can lead – but that is another thing again, and something that I will return to) and on reading this new work I recognized immediately this almost dream-like quality in Modiano’s writing that is really quite singular to him. (It must surely be that this is a characteristic of the original French (and Modiano works in general) so I must say Elisabeth Edl seems to capture this beautifully in her German translation.)
Out of the present, the 70 year old narrator Jean remembers his youth in the Paris of the early sixties and in the telling weaves a fine tapestry of fragmented memory of people and place. (Wonderfully illustrated at one point by the metaphor of the Metro plan that lights up on selecting a destination). As if in a trance, Jean takes us with him as he revisits ghosts from this past; those women (enigmatic all in one way or another and beautifully portrayed) who left his life as they entered it, shrouded by mystery, but live still along the boulevards, in the cafes and apartments of his memory, where secrets as dark as the light of a Paris night are shared.
Sleep of Memory is to me a profoundly haunting literary jewel, and if someone were to say (and I have heard it said) that Patrick Modiano somehow seems to write the same story over and over again, then I would reply that is because perhaps that is the only story.
Which has led me back to this impossible book from Julian Barnes! And I should say this so favoured (by me) and very British of writers of a certain age has much in common with the quintessential Parisian Modiano (also of a certain age), most particularly in their consideration of the elusive nature and inherent imperfections of memory. I know only that Barnes is a Francophile and worships at the altar of Flaubert.
And on (literary) jewels, another Modiano book has come to my attention: La Petite Bijou (2001) translated into English only in 2016 as Little Jewel!