Haunted by the Holocaust: Three novellas by Patrick Modiano

Earlier this year Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature ‘for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. A prolific and celebrated novelist in France, Modiano is not well known in Britain or America, where only a third of his works have been translated and many are out of print.

Yale University Press has a coup in these circumstances with Mark Polizzotti’s translation of three of Modiano’s novellas, commissioned before the Nobel announcement. The novellas originally appeared over five years: Remise de peine (Suspended Sentences) 1988; Fleurs de ruine (Flowers of Ruin) 1991; and Chien de printemps (Afterimage) 1993. In his introduction Polizzotti explains that the third title — literally ‘dog of spring’, figuratively an expletive meaning rotten or miserable spring — has been freely translated.

The novellas are discrete and discontinuous but remarkably coherent. They are structured like detective stories but offer no resolution. Instead they investigate the shape of memory, probing moral and historical complexity with spare, finely honed prose. Set in or close to Paris, each is narrated in the first person by a character closely resembling the author, and all are haunted by the Occupation and Holocaust. Modiano describes his fiction as ‘a kind of autobiography, but one that is dreamed-up or imaginary. Even the photographs of my parents have become portraits of imaginary characters.’

A mysterious photographer who left France in 1964 is the absent centre of Afterimage. Almost 30 years later, the narrator remembers meeting Francis Jansen with his Rolleiflex in a café on Place Denfert-Rochereau and offering to catalogue his archive of images, dating back to the 1940s. The youthful narrator thought the pictures had documentary value since they bore witness to people and things no longer extant.