“Sometimes you remember certain episodes of your life and you need proof that you haven’t dreamed them.”
— Patrick Modiano, In The Cafe Of Lost Youth
We’ve all experienced a silver summer: a season or period in our lives that glows, inflamed with retrospective significance. While it’s happening we may sense some looming consequence, or not. Over time these magical moments become embedded in memory and endure, gathering profundity even as the remainder of life mundanely accumulates and all our subsequent memories jumble and meld together.
At some point, usually in middle age, we begin to reflect: examining and polishing the impressions of that special time. Every silver season is deeply entwined with recalled images of other people, or a certain person. And in the novels of Patrick Modiano, all silver seasons are irrevocably tarnished.
Over the last month I’ve read five novels by Modiano. In varying measures, a silver season or formative era figures in each of these slender volumes.
Although he’s the author of more than 40 books, Patrick Modiano (born in 1945) wasn’t widely known outside of his native France before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. As well as novels, he’s also written plays and children’s books. At age 27 he co-wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle’s 1974 film Lacombe, Lucien and beginning in the late 1960s, he wrote song lyrics, some recorded by Françoise Hardy and other French pop singers.
Between their terse prose and propulsive pace, the five novels I read — devoured, really — resemble detective fiction and/or tales of espionage. Yet crimes in Modiano World are ambiguous, and characters spy on their own histories. The past is a nagging, devilishly persistent vision that can neither be fully remembered or forgotten. In Missing Person,detective Guy Roland is an amnesiac struggling to piece together his identity: sifting through old photos and fitfully interviewing secondhand witnesses to his former life.
In Villa Triste, 18 year old Victor Chamara (“that’s the name I used on the registration form”) arrives in a resort town. His desire to escape a hazy troubled past for the anonymity of a “safe zone” in nearby Switzerland serves both as a metaphor for post-adolescent discovery, and a reference to the Nazi-dominated Paris that he’s fleeing. This is Modiano’s underlying theme, surfacing in all these novels: how France suffered collective amnesia with regard to the German occupation during World War II.
Victor falls in with an oddball dynamic duo. Yvonne (“family name? I’ve forgotten it”) and her sidekick, the gay doctor René Meinthe, are only a few years older than Victor but seem to be far more worldly and experienced. At least on the surface. “What brought them together was their shared boredom with small-town life and their plans for the future.”
Yvonne and Victor conduct an affair, alternately torrid and languid, with René relishing the role of their hedonistic, borderline-creepy mentor. This summer romance sparks, and fizzles suddenly, as the season itself wanes.
“Time has shrouded all things in a mist of changing colors: sometimes a pale green, sometimes a slightly punk blue. A mist? No an indestructible veil that smothers all sound and through which I can see Yvonne and Meinthe but not hear them. I’m afraid their silhouettes may blur and fade in the end, and so, to preserve a little of their reality…”
In Young Once, Louis and Odile are a comfortable couple, parents of two small children, who take stock of their lives at age 35. They recall meeting in their early twenties, as new fresh-faced arrivals in Paris during the late 1950s or early 1960s. Odile hoped to launch a singing career while Louis, fresh from military service, knocked around: basically open to anything. So he was especially vulnerable to recruitment by the dubious Brossier, a sketchy entrepreneur cum bullshit slinger who pulls Louis into his money laundering schemes. Odile gets similiarly entangled with Georges Bellune, a sleazy music-biz promoter. Joining forces, Odile and Louis manage to pull back from the brink before descending into criminality or worse. A decade later, their louche and disreputable coming of age recedes in the distance.
“Something — he wondered later if it was simply his youth — something that weighed upon him until that moment broke off him, the way a piece of rock slides slowly into the sea and disappears in a spray of foam.”
The past resurfaces, and refuses to recede in the concise (even by Modiano standards) Honeymoon. Killing time in a bar, documentary filmmaker Jean B. hears a triggering news report. “My heart missed a beat: the woman who had taken her own life, as the barman put it, was somebody I had known.” Jean puts his own life on hold, ghosting his wife and work partner Annette, while he reconstructs that silver summer on the Riveria decades earlier, when the late Ingrid and her husband Rigaud befriended him. Memorably (or not), they accompanied him to a jazz festival in Provence Juan-les-Prins.
“We lived only at night. I have not the slightest recollection of Juan-les-Prins in the daytime. Except at the fleeting moment when the sun rose. There were so many faces around us that they have all become merged and I can’t make out which one belonged to Dodo Mamaroso (real-life jazz musician). The orchestras played in the pine forest, and that same summer I met Annette. In those days, I thought I was happy.”
In the present, Jean can only speculate about what drove Ingrid to suicide, though Modiano subtly suggests she might be Jewish, raising the spectre of Occupation once again. “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.”
In The Cafe Of Lost Youth was my favorite, and possibly the place to start with Modiano because this novel reads like the oral history of an au courant underground scene. Set in 1950s Paris, it could just as well be downtown NYC in the 1980s or any local bohemian place and time of your choosing.
“I watched the customers. Most of them weren’t more than twenty-five years old. A nineteenth-century novelist might’ve described them as ‘the student bohemians.’ But few of them, in my opinion, were enrolled at the Sorbonne or the Écoledes des Mines. I must admit that watching them up close, I didn’t have high hopes for their futures.”
A charismatic young woman known as Louki becomes a beloved regular at a funky bar called the Condé, and then disappears. Each chapter recounts her story in a different patron’s voice, hers included. Gradually, we learn Louki’s real name was Jacqueline Delanque; she entered a brief marriage, mostly to escape a claustrophobic home life with her single mother, who worked as a hostess at the Moulin Rouge. The Condé was her oasis, where she became close with an aspiring writer named Roland. He recalls their milieu:
“I remembered the text I was trying to write back when I knew Louki. I had called it On Neutral Zones. There was a series of transitional zones in Paris, where we were on the border of everything else, in transit, or even held suspended. Within, we benefited from a certain kind of immunity. I might have called them free zones, but neutral zones was more precise.”
For Louki, Roland and other colorful Condé barflies such as Zacharias, Jean-Michel, Fred, Tarzan and La Houpa, what feels lost is not just youth but any sense of advancement, opportunity or adventure. They’re stuck in time, preserved in amber before they even begin to live their adult lives.
“For me, the Condé was a refuge from all the drabness I anticipated in life. There will one day be a part of me — the best part — that I will be forced to leave behind there.”
Looking back to a silver season is at best a dangerous proposition. Reading Patrick Modiano, especially In The Café Of Lost Youth, constantly reminded me of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), especially this passage from The Guermantes Way.
“Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years.”
Forewarned is forearmed. Tread carefully.
Mark Coleman 