So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood
Patrick Modiano
Quercus
‘Almost nothing. Like an insect bite that initially strikes you as very slight.’ Thus begins Patrick Modiano’s novel, as shadowy and evasive as any he’s written. It’s a murder mystery with a victim barely mentioned, a noir novel with no detective. There is only a reclusive ageing writer, Daragane, whose phone never rings until one sultry autumn day when a voice on the other end, ‘dreary and threatening’, informs him that he has found his address book and wants to return it. A name, hardly remembered by Daragane, catches his attention.
Daragane is drawn, not so much into the world of this sinister yet cartoonish figure and his obligatory accompanying femme fatale, but rather into his own early childhood and the strange figures occupying it. It is a world he has banished from his memory, much of it returning to him through hazy, brilliantly rendered fog, some remembered in acute detail. The phone call triggers a cascading recollection: ‘The present and past merge together, and that seems quite natural because they were only separated by a cellophane partition. An insect bite was all it took to pierce the cellophane.’ In the same way, the slim volume at first seems slight, but its eerie, powerful evocation of postwar Paris continues to resonate long after it has been put down.
Words: Liza Cox
