Translation from
Swedish from
http://www.dixikon.se/utvalda-bocker/franska/patrick-modiano-lherbe-des-nuits/
by PER ARNE TJÄDER
Bustling city, city full of dreams,
where the spectrum looms over the passing –byes in full daylight!
where the spectrum looms over the passing –byes in full daylight!
The lines from Charles Baudelaire's poem "The Seven Old Men" came to mind when I read Patrick Modianos new novel L'Herbe des Nuits - the title, according to a poem by Osip Mandelstam. Rarely has the Paris that the author always returns seemed to be so full of ghosts, not only from the narrator Jeans own past, but also from the Parisian history. For example Baudelaire's mistress Jeanne Duval appears to Jean, on the streets in full day.
Paris remains a city of unanswered questions about the old day’s poets and their wives as well as of difficult years in the last centuries under German occupation and after wartime political affairs. But also of the impending oblivion which always characterized it.
As always he mixes in events and people from his real life, and some - like the police man Langlais - have previously appeared in the autobiography Une pedigree, from 2005 In the new novel he seeks at last Jean and submits a dossier with information on what really happened many years earlier. But not all the mists disperse, Paris guards his mysteries.
As a dark center in the novel broods thus one of the French post-war "business" from the fall of 1965, in which the Moroccan opposition politician Mehdi Ben Barka was kidnapped on the streets of Paris by French security police and then murdered in unclear circumstances. But here we perceive the whole thing with Jean’s childish eyes on a dim distance. Something very serious is going on, there, he learns of a mysterious Moroccan who operates with a weird bunch in a gloomy hotel in Montparnasse, which is under the patronage of the French police. But above all of the even more elusive Dannie, one in the circle of young women Modiano's heroes are drawn to. Jean - incidentally Patrick's middle name – tries in vain to find out what she has really to do with the people in the hotel. But at the same time he seems to be entirely in the hands of Dannie - just one of her many "names". Does she really murdered someone and who was it? He cannot and does not want to know. The mystery is as a part of its own life.
Modiano, who probably know everything
you can know about this business, cleverly put out threads that unravel for
those who are familiar with - someone says that behind the "Georges" of
the hotel hides Georges Boucheseiche, an old collaborator and therefore maybe Ben
Barka’s killer. And anyone who wants can surely continue the subtle treasure hunt
for names and hidden allusions. But Modiano’s aim is to create a general
feeling of insecurity in a corrupt time and depict a young man who wanders into
a world and a city that carries the memories and secrets that he is also part of
without knowing quite how and why.
Patrick Modiano - whose virtuosity is now so obvious that people no longer think of it - has often said that the trauma that became his central theme is that he was born just after the war and occupation, but that his life was still entirely dependent on what happened in those years. And he also knew that his childhood was populated by many who held each other on the back to get away. Thus he varies the narrative of European basic pattern: the young man seeking meaning in a inauthentic world.
Often his characters try to keep a voice against oblivion, if only, in the ether or a face on a faded photograph. In this subtly well composed novel Modiano reminds rather about how difficult it can be to understand what is actually happening right in the moment, but that even "the very serious things" somehow lives on - if only in an old police dossier or in the lucid dreams nourished by a city of ghosts.
Patrick Modiano - whose virtuosity is now so obvious that people no longer think of it - has often said that the trauma that became his central theme is that he was born just after the war and occupation, but that his life was still entirely dependent on what happened in those years. And he also knew that his childhood was populated by many who held each other on the back to get away. Thus he varies the narrative of European basic pattern: the young man seeking meaning in a inauthentic world.
Often his characters try to keep a voice against oblivion, if only, in the ether or a face on a faded photograph. In this subtly well composed novel Modiano reminds rather about how difficult it can be to understand what is actually happening right in the moment, but that even "the very serious things" somehow lives on - if only in an old police dossier or in the lucid dreams nourished by a city of ghosts.
