Michael > Recent Status Updates

“You are in large part what others know, or think they know, about you, what they see when they look at you; but who are you when you’re alone in the dark and can’t sleep and your inert body is anchored to the bed and your untrammeled imagination confronts the intolerably slow pace of time?”

“Sometimes in the course of a journey you hear and tell stories of other journeys. It seems that with the act of departing the memory of previous travels becomes more vivid, and also that you listen more closely and better appreciate the stories you’re told: a parenthesis of meaningful words within the other, temporal, parenthesis of the journey.”

“She was there behind the glass, in the yellow light, and I wish I could travel back in time. I would find myself on the sidewalk of the Rue Cujas just where I was before, but as I am today, and it would be simple for me to lead Jacqueline out of that fishbowl and into the open air.”

“He sips on his hot chocolate and coffee mix and feels like a genius for breeding this blistering-fast colt. The whole rest of his life is a catastrophe; his marriage, his family, his dying friends, his lost opportunities. But this colt — even in the dark, as he flashes by — rippling sorrel muscle — the rhythmic blasts from his nostrils — this colt lights up what’s left of the man’s mind.”

“The Quai de Conti remained empty for a long while, the time it took the traffic lights to turn green, over toward the Pont-Neuf. And before the next few cars appeared, there was silence, no doubt the same silence my father had known on evenings during the Occupation, behind this same window.”

“The transformation of difficult chapters in history — in which certain connections are as yet unclarified — into newspaper anecdotes, prompted by anniversaries (“thirtieth anniversary of the Liberation”). Erasing, selecting, stressing. What may be told boils down to what the editor in chief of any given newspaper deems acceptable[.]”

“I constructed all the hypotheses concerning Philippe de Pacheco, whose face I didn’t even know. I took notes. Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.”

But what do you do with yourself now?

I wander around from place to place.

Aimlessly?

What’s there to aim for?

That must get old after a while.

I don’t know what else to do.

“On a hot blue day I’m heading out to Faith where the great saddle horses originate. I’m going to get me one. A buttermilk dun with a quarter-moon brand on his cheek. I’ve seen him in my dreams. That’s right. I’ve seen him from far away. I’m going to bring him back home and ride him down to get the mail. And when they ask me where he’s from, I’ll say I bought him out in Faith on a hot blue day.”

“And the highway itself, now broken up with tall yellow weeds and potholes deep enough to kill a Ford of any kind and… now the dead highway seems to be returning to the ancient buffalo trace beneath it where someone must have tried to copy the migrations of vast herds that once blackened the landscape. Maybe they felt the buffalo knew where they were going even if they themselves didn’t have a clue.”

“I’m getting very distracted by an extremely cute Mexican waitress in here, named Esmeralda, I find out. She’s wearing this little pink frilly apron over her tight jeans and she keeps my coffee cup full without me having to ask. She has a smile like the break of day and an ‘onion ass,’ as old cowboy Jones used to say: ‘Just makes you want to break down and weep.’”

“Wasn’t there once a tall gray piano player too? Gentle. He came in a bright blue suit, haircut like a Fuller brush; played ‘Camptown Ladies’ all through the night of Great-Aunt Gracie’s death then later hanged himself in a Pasadena garage alongside his Chrysler sedan. I remember that now. Told stories of how Gracie was quite the Grand Dame;…”

“How did we become what we are today?”

“Just think about all the children that couldn’t be born because their fathers died as young soldiers in the war. What do those children who aren’t born think? They think nothing at all. Nothing? Can’t you understand: a thing that doesn’t exist can’t think, or feel, or whatever.”

“But memory’s recall — which incidentally varies markedly in people who seem to have had the exact same experience — may not be a matter of biochemistry, and may not universally be a matter of choice.
If this were not so, some people’s assertions would be accurate: documents could not be surpassed; the narrator would therefore be superfluous.”

“She raised her arm gently and ran the tips of her fingers over my temple and cheek, as if she was for one last time seeking a contact. Then she lowered her arm and the gate closed behind her. That arm suddenly falling and the metallic clank of the gate shutting made me understand that from one moment to another one can lose heart.”

“I felt a vague twinge of remorse: has a biographer the right to suppress certain details under the pretext that he considers them superfluous? Or do they all have their importance, and must he present them one after the other, impartially, so that not a single one is left out, as in the inventory of a distraint.”

Vic cleared his throat and smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t bother throwing people out of the house if they annoy me.’ He leaned a little closer. ‘If they annoy me in that way — with Melinda — ‘ he nodded meaningly towards the bathroom — ‘I kill them.’

Modiano on the three novelas in this volume: “… I thought I’d written them discontinuously, in successive bouts of forgetfulness, but often the same faces, the same names, the same places, the same sentences recur from one to the other.”

“We always stay the same, and the people we have been in the past go on living until the end of time.”

“Lov Bensey trudged homeward through the deep white sand of the gully-washed tobacco road with a sack of winter turnips on his back. He had put himself to a lot of trouble to get the turnips; it was a long and tiresome walk all the way to Fuller and back again.”

“During the day, everything slipped through our fingers. Nice, with its blue sky, brightly colored buildings like gigantic frosted cakes or ocean liners, its deserted streets in the bright Sunday sun, our shadows on the sidewalks, the palm trees, the Promenade des Anglais — it all slipped past, like a rear projection.”

“I was there when they opened his mouth and removed the dentures. They set his teeth on a stainless-steel table and attached a yellow tag with wire to them. The tag had numbers written in black. The numbers were the date and time of his death. They attached another tag, with the same numbers, to the big toe of his right foot.”