Review of Suspended Sentences, by Patrick Modiano

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I was curious to read Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, by French writer Patrick Modiano (translated by Mark Polizzotti, 2014), because the author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014. First, let me say that if you like German writer W.G. Sebald, you will also like Modiano. Had Sebald lived, I suspect he, too, would have won the Nobel Prize. Both writers have a sadness to them, of places and people lost to time, and a strong sense of their remnants in the present: buildings, streets, villages, place-names, letters, photographs, objects, fragmented memories. Both, too, write with the awareness of World War II imprinted on their narratives. Modiano seems preoccupied with people who are on the margins of society: petty criminals, vagrants, prostitutes, absent fathers, and collaborators during the German occupation of France. His narrator in the novellas speaks from the perspective of a boy or young man, or as an adult looking back at his former self. These narrators capture the impermanence of relationships, the transience of time, and the malleability of identity. What we know of others is tentative and fragmentary. What we know of ourselves, too. We could easily be someone else. This sense of doubt is heightened by the limited perspectives of young people, who are often “in the dark,” both because they don’t understand the activities and words of adults and because they are kept “in the dark” by those adults. In the book’s first novella, Afterimage, a young admirer painstakingly catalogs the work of a famous photographer because he “refused to accept that people and things could disappear without a trace” (15); ironically, the photographer himself wishes to vanish, “blending into the surroundings once and for all” (55). In all three novellas, there is an almost obsessive attention to names of people and place names, in Paris, its suburbs, and other French towns. The author catalogs these names and places much like the young man in Afterimage catalogs photographs: in an effort to grasp hold of people, meanings, and events that blur and vanish like ghosts. In an effort to find evidence of our own and other people’s lives. Like the relationship between memory and present perceptions, Modiano’s writing does not follow a clear path, but digresses, takes unforeseen turns, and shifts topic abruptly, much like a walker wandering at will down streets that are familiar and yet strange. Although the three novellas were originally published separately, between 1988 and 1993, places, characters, and themes intersect in tantalizing and mysterious ways, creating a sense of fragmented unity. In these novellas, perhaps one could say, along with the photographer in Afterimage, that Modiano has come close to “managing to create silence with words” (8). Perhaps. But nothing is certain. Rien est certain.
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Published on May 12, 2015 06:13
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Tags:
french, nobel-prize
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