Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014.  He writes in French, and for the next several years a small cadre of translators went to work producing English versions of all his novels.  I believe the one who has translated the most is Mark Polizzotti.  His work on one of the early translations, a book of long stories called Suspended Sentences, was one of the first to market and I fell hard for this talented writer.  Unfortunately, I must have lent that one to somebody and couldn’t find it in the bookcase.  So I picked one off the stack I hadn’t yet read.
 
Like most of Modiano’s novels, Sleep of Memory is really a novella, this one particularly slim at something like 22,000 words by my estimate.  Like many of his books, it uses first-person narration, and here he blurs the line between the protagonist narrator and the writer himself; it thus reads in places like autobiography, or historical fiction in which the protagonist is the narrator.  Another familiar factor is the setting—Paris, in the years following the Second World War—where a young man is trying to make sense of what happened to him and his parents in the war, and where to go from here.  All this is Modiano’s home turf, and you can almost hear Édith Piaf on the soundtrack.
 
We first meet Mireille Ourousov, a woman staying in his mother’s abandoned apartment, where he lives a sort of latch-key teenager’s life in Paris in the early ‘60s with her friend, Jacques de Baviére.  Then comes Geneviève Dalàme, whom he meets in a café as he wanders in the still-dark mornings, and who lives in a hotel in the 13th and works at Polydor Studios.  He gives her a copy of A la mémoire d'un ange by Gabrielle Veraldi, and she introduces him to a middle-aged woman, Madeleine Péraud, who lives in a high-ceilinged salon with tall windows in the Vale-de-Grâce.  Dalàme urges him to speak with Péraud about “the meetings.”
 
“One evening, she placed on the red sofa between Geneviève Dalame and me a volume called Meetings with Remarkable Men.  Today, fifty years later, that title and the word ‘meetings’ make me think of something that had never occurred to me: Unlike many people my age, I never tried to meet the four or five intellectual guides who dominated university life in those days, or become their disciple. Why?  In my capacity as an absentee student, it would have been natural for me to seek out a mentor, living as I did in a state of solitude and confusion.”
 
As he walks Geneviève home that night, she repeats more than once about Pèraud, “You really should talk to her about it,” sounding anxious even.  “She’ll get you up to speed . . .”
 
A few days later, he rides the bus with Geneviève to her work at Polydor Studios, then heads to the Val-de-Grâce to see Péraud.  “I read the book you lent me . . . I’d already heard of it.”  A friend he’d known in boarding school had parents who were in a group that met with its author, G.I. Gurdjieff, in the Haute-Savoie, and he’d met a few of his disciples.  She reacts to all this with a worried expression.  And she urges him to get Geneviève Dalàme to come live there, in the salon apartment, and he can come live there, too. “We must help Geneviève,” she says, in a tone “so serious that she ended up convincing me Geneviève Dalàme was in imminent danger.”  What that danger might be is unclear.
 
Until we turn the page, and a new chapter begins:
 
“Six years later, I was walking along Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire, near the Mosque and the wall surrounding the botanical gardens.  A woman was walking ahead of me, holding a little boy by the hand.  Her nonchalant gait reminded me of someone.  I couldn’t help staring at her.

​I quickened my pace and caught up to the woman and little boy.  I turned toward her.  Geneviève Dalàme.  We hadn’t seen each other in those six years.  She smiled at me as if we’d just parted company the day before.”
 
Modiano is reported to have said that he has felt as if he were writing the same book over and over again.  This, I think, is because the books don’t rely much on plot, are mostly set in Paris and environs, and are about a man who’s lived a life very much like his own.  He has developed a distinctive and intriguing style he’s comfortable in, and so are his readers.  But many great writers explore over and over the place they grew up in, or lived their adult lives in, or both: Russo gives us Central Maine or Martha’s Vineyard, Richard Ford gives us Coastal Maine or New Jersey, Paul Auster gives us New York City, Colm Tóibín gives us Enniscorthy.  Because the plots and characters change, they don’t feel like the same book.  With Modiano, the plots are generally so light, the protagonists are largely himself, and the other characters are those who peopled his life during his teenage years during the war, and beyond.  And we feel them, and their world, like nobody’s business.
 
But there are exceptions.  Sundays in August, from 1986, is set in Nice on the French Riviera and reads more like a traditional crime novel than the others.  It opens with the protagonist spotting a character from his shady past hawking leather coats on the Promenade des Anglais, on his way to meeting up with a lover who’s wearing the huge stolen jewel they are trying to offload on some wealthy but unsuspecting tourist.  Little Jewel, from 1992, features a female protagonist and narrator, who spots her long-lost mother—or is it her mother, and is that the same yellow coat she’s wearing?—on the Paris metro.  She follows her, of course, into an overdue examination of everything that matters.