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Dans
le café de la jeunesse perdue
read by Henri Astier
● For almost forty years, and almost as
many books, Patrick Modiano has written pretty much the
same story. A typical Modiano novel involves a budding
writer and a languid beauty (often called Jacqueline, although she has
aliases) who drift though the Paris of the 1960s. The two have broken with
absentee parents, and run into bad company while seeking the comfort of a
surrogate family. The affair usually ends tragically.
Modiano's previous book, Un Pedigree, was something of a
departure - but only in its openly autobiographical character. Readers were
told what they had suspected all along: he wheeling-dealing father, the
bizarre foster families, the aimless youth redeemed by literature, the
fleeting, shady associates, were all true.
Having lifted the veil, aficionados wondered, what would the author do next? Was
the magic broken? Had Modiano, at the age of 60,
written the final cathartic chapter of a glittering literary career? Or would
he now turn to something completely different? We now have the answer.
Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue
is about a young man with literary aspirations and an aloof beauty, variously
called Jacqueline and Louki, who wander though Paris in the early 1960s in
search of the proper parents they never had. They and various shadows meet
like ships in the night, before tragedy strikes.
The style of the book will be as familiar to Modiano
readers as the plot. Apart from the story being told from the perspective of
four successive narrators - something he had not tried before - Modiano makes full use of his trademark techniques.
Foremost among them is the combination of geographical precision and
chronological vagueness. Every event in his event in his novels is pinpointed
to location (usually Paris) with the scrupulousness of a police report. But
every area he describes is also imbued with layers of emotion - and this is
where the creative blurring begins.
In this book the Montmartre-Pigalle district, where Jacqueline grew up and
met shady types during regular nightly escapes as a teenager, conjures up a
clear sense of threat. The Latin Quarter -notably the bohemian café mentioned
in the title - is a refuge where she can start afresh under a new name.
In the young man's narrative, on the other hand, the Latin Quarter is fraught
with danger. He prefers to live in one of Paris's anonymous "neutral
zones" - the western hinterland beyond the Arc de Triomphe.
 Modiano's characters are driven by their inner
geography. "There were numerous zones in the neighbourhood, and I knew
all its frontiers, even the invisible ones," Jacqueline writes. The
Seine is the most definite of Paris' frontiers. The young woman sought
shelter on the Left Bank "as if crossing the river protected her from
imminent danger", writes another narrator - echoing Modiano's
lifelong obsession with the Second World War and the "line of
demarcation" along the Loire that separated occupied from non-occupied
France.
Modiano's topography of memory structures his
narrative, and gives it its distinctive, hypnotic character. The story
unfolds not in chronological order, but follows a subtle thread linking a
place to various events that happened there and the feelings the area
projects. In the end, we only have a dim idea of what actually happened and
when - especially as many crucial details are omitted. But none of this feels
like an artificial literary device, and readers are left haunted by the
cityscape Modiano paints in disjointed but vivid,
half-finished strokes.
How can such a slender storyline and ethereal set of characters be so
affecting? Probably because neither matters very much. Modiano's
art rests instead on the evocative power of language. His young man says of
the books he and Jacqueline used to read: "She hoped to find a meaning
for her life in them, but it was the sound of the words and the music of the
sentences that captivated me."
Modiano's susceptibility to the magic of words remains
intact, and contagious. This may be why, after four decades of telling the same
story, he has not gone stale.
Article paru
précédemment dans le Times Literary Supplement, le 4 juillet 2007.
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