So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood
Patrick Modiano, trans. by Euan Cameron
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood
Patrick Modiano, trans. by Euan Cameron
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
He continually reintroduces the story, and then he transitions into the past where desire and remembrance tug at the heart strings of who we were, who we knew and who we have become. How are we the same when we are no longer the person we used to be?.
The overlap, the back-and-forth, may seem repetitious, but it isn’t. Rather, it makes reading any single Modiano book like encountering one installment in an ongoing, multivolume work. This press of memory becomes more resonant the more one reads.
The setup is classically Modianesque. The protagonist, writer Jean Daragane, bearing a considerable degree of resemblance to the author himself, is plunged into a mysterious investigation, obliged to play the amateur sleuth. The subject of the search remains tantalisingly – or excruciatingly, according to one’s tolerance for ambiguity – just out of frame.
...although the people and places in this frustrating puzzle – rue de l’Arcade, rue de Charonne, square du Graisivaudan – promise to throw light on his own life, they don’t seem to add up to anything.
Modiano makes his readers hunt for links 'like the piece of a jigsaw puzzle that has been lost'. A little sleuthing shows that some of the names and addresses cited in the novel allude to the worst horrors of the Occupation years. He never spells them out. Meanwhile, in the foreground, the child's sense of abandonment incubates a grief that, if triggered, may 'unfurl through the years' like the fuse on a rediscovered wartime bomb. Euan Cameron's atmospheric translation does ample justice to this spectral tale..
Claustrophobic, moody, none-more-noir novel.
A quietly haunting search for the truth—or at least for the facts—of a postwar French childhood, Nobel-winner Modiano’s novel spins out over a summer in which 'everything is uncertain'.