So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood by Patrick Modiano (translated by Euan Cameron).
Title: So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood.
Author: Patrick Modiano (translated by Euan Cameron).
Genre: Fiction, mystery, crime, noir, novella.
Country: France.
Language: French.
Publication Date: 2014.
Summary: In the stillness of his Paris apartment, Jean Daragane has built a life of total solitude. Then a surprising phone call shatters the silence of an unusually hot September, and the threatening voice on the other end of the line leaves Daragane wary but irresistibly curious. Almost at once, he finds himself entangled with a shady gambler and a beautiful, fragile young woman, who draw Daragane into the mystery of a decades-old murder. The investigation will force him to confront the memory of a trauma he had all but buried. The novel seeks to penetrate the deepest enigmas of identity, and compel us to ask whether we ever know who we truly are.
My rating: 6.5/10
My review:
♥ Almost nothing, like an insect bite that initially strikes you as very slight. At least that is what you tell yourself in a low voice so as to reassure yourself.
..Le Tremblay. Chantal. Square du Graisivaudan. These words had travelled a long way. An insect bite, very slight to begin with, and it causes you an increasingly sharp pain, and very soon a feeling of being torn apart. The present and the 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 pirece the cellophane.
♥ If the stranger had not phoned, he would have totally forgotten the loss of this address book. He tried to recall the names that were in it. The week before, he had even wanted to start a new one and had begun to compose a list on a sheet of white paper. After a short while, he had torn it up. None of the names belonged to people who had mattered in his life: he had never needed to write down their addresses and phone numbers. He knew them by heart.
..He leafed through the notebook absentmindedly. Among these telephone numbers, there was not one that he would have wanted to dial. And then, the two or three missing numbers, those that had mattered to him and which he still knew by heart, would no longer respond.
♥ He could, of course, not keep his promise and leave this person waiting vainly at 42 rue de l'Arcade. But then there would always be something unresolved, a threat. At a low ebb on certain solitary afternoons, he had often dreamt that the telephone would ring and that a gentle voice would make a date with him. He remembered the title of a novel he had read: Le Temps des rencontres. Perhaps that time of meetings was not yet over for him.
♥ On the other side of the road stood the large building at 73... He wondered whether one of the windows of his father's office had not overlooked that side of the street. Which floor? But these memories drifted away like bubbles of soap or fragments of a dream that vanished on waking. His memory would have been livelier in the café in rue des Mathurins, opposite the theatre, where he used to wait for his mother, or in the close vicinity of the gare Saint-Lazare, an area he had known well in the past. But no. It would not have been. It was no longer the same city.
♥ ..he himself had not seen anybody for three months and was none the worse for it... On the contrary. In his solitude, he had never felt so light-hearted, with strange moments of elation either in the morning or the evening, as though everything were still possible and, as the title of the old film has it, adventure lay at the corner of the street... Never, even during the summers of his youth, had life seemed so free of oppression as it had since the beginning of this summer. But in summer, everything is uncertain - a "metaphysical" season, his philosophy teacher, Maurice Caveing, had once told him.
♥ He was probably mistaken. When you have been too long on your own - he had not spoken to anyone since the beginning of the summer - you become suspicious and touchy towards your fellow men and you risk assessing them incorrectly. No, they are not as bad as all that.
♥ It was strange to enter into people's lives so quickly... He had thought that this would be unlikely to happen to him any longer at his age, through weariness on his part and because of the feeling that other people slowly grow away from you.
♥ Almost eleven o'clock in the evening. When he was at home on his own at that time, he often experienced what is known as "momentary flagging". Then he would go into a neighbourhood café that stayed open very late at night. The bright light, the hubbub of noise, the comings and goings, the conversations in which he deluded himself he was participating, all this helped him overcome his momentary flagging after a short while. But for some time, he had no longer needed to resort to this expedient. It was enough for him to look out of his study window at the tree planted in the courtyard of the adjoining building, which retained its leaves much later than the others, until November. He had been told that it was a hornbeam, or an aspen, he was not sure. He regretted all the lost years when he had not paid sufficient attention to either the trees or the flowers. He, who no longer read any books other than Buffon's Histoire naturelle, suddenly recalled a passage from the memoirs of a French philosopher. She had been shocked by what a woman had said during the war: "After all, the war doesn't alter my relationship with a blade of grass." She probably reckoned that this woman was frivolous or indifferent. But for him, Daragane, the phrase had another meaning: in periods of disaster or mental anxierty, all you need do is look for a fixed point in order to keep your balance and not topple overboard. Your gaze alights on a blade of grass, a tree, the petals of a flower, as though you were clinging on to a buoy. This hornbeam - or this aspen - on the other side of his windowpane reassured him. And even though it was almost eleven o'clock at night, he felt comforted by its silent presence.
♥ Childhood memories often consist of small, trivial details that come from nowhere.
♥ She seemed to want to say more. It would soon be the time of night when the make-up starts to run and you are on the brink of revealing secrets.
♥ So, did the Cercle Gaillon still exist? Unless the same ridiculous words that you have heard in your youth return like an old tune or a stammer, many years later and towards the end of your life?
♥ Yes, it all had the lightness of a dream. And the pages of the "dossier" had also given him a strange sensation: because of certain names, and especially that of Annie Astrand, and all those words piled on top of each other without double-spacing, he suddenly found himself confronted with certain details of his life, but reflected in a distorting mirror, with those disjointed details that pursue you on nights when you have a temperature.
♥ He left the study to ascertain whether he had left the light on in the kitchen. The window there overlooked the street. Yes, he had left the light on. He switched it off and stood by the window. A moment ago, he had imagined that Ottolini was keeping watch outside. Such thoughts come to you very late, when you have not slept, thoughts that you once had long ago, as a child, that frighten you. No-one. But he could be hiding behind the fountain or, on the right, behind one of the trees in the square.
♥ He had written this book only in the hope that she might get in touch with him. Writing a book, for him, was also a way of beaming a searchlight or sending out coded signals to certain people with whom he had lost touch. It was enough to scatter their names at random through the pages and wait until they finally produced news of themselves. But in the case of Annie Astrand, he had not mentioned her name and he had endeavoured to cover his tracks. She would not be able to recognise herself in any of his characters. He had never understood why anyone should want to put someone who had mattered to them unto a novel. Once that person had drifted into a novel in much the same way as one might walk through a mirror, he escaped from you forever. He had never existed in real life. He had been reduced to nothings... You needed to go about it in a more subtle way.
♥ For the past few years, he hardly ever used this computer on which most of his research came to noting. The rare people whom he would have liked to trace had succeeded in escaping the vigilance of this machine. They had slipped through the net because they belonged to another age and because they were not exactly saints. He remembered his father whom he hardly knew and who used to say to him in a soft voice: "I'd be a tough case for dozens of examining magistrates." No trace of his father on the computer.
♥ Normally, he displayed far greater vigilance when he walked in the street, ready to change pavements if he saw someone in the distance whom he knew or who might accost him. He was aware that you very seldom met anyone you really had wanted to meet. Twice or three times in a lifetime?
♥ He had not immediately noticed the presence, that night, of Perrin de Lara, in front of him, sitting on the terrace. Alone.
Why had he spoken to him? He had not seen him for over ten years, and this man would certainly not recognise him. But he was writing his first book, and Annie Astrand was filling his mind in an obsessive way. Perhaps Perrin de Lara knew something about her?
He had stood in front of his table, and the man had looked up. No, he did not recognise him.
"Jean Daragane."
"Ah... Jean..."
He smiled at him, a faint smile, as though he were embarrassed that someone should recognise him at that time of night, on his own, in such a place.
"You've grown taller over the years... Sit down, Jean..."
He pointed to the chair, opposite him. Daragane hesitated for a fraction of a second. The glazed terrace door was ajar. All he had to do was say what he normally said: "Wait... I'll be back..." Then go out into the open air of the night, and take a deep breath. And, most importantly, avoid any further contact with a shadow, who would be waiting over there, alone, on a café terrace, for all eternity.
♥ He sat up straight and looked over towards the glazed terrace door. In spite of the coarsening of his face and the grey curls that now made his hair look like a wig, he retained that statuesque stillbness that he often displayed ten years ago, one of the rare images of Jacques Perrin de Lara that Daragane remembered. And he also had the habit of frequently turning his head in profile when speaking to people, as he did at this moment. He must have once been told that he had a rather fine profile, but all those who had told him so were dead.
♥ He stopped speaking, and he would say nothing further on the subject. It was purely a distant memory that did not concern him. One should never expect anyone to reply to one's questions.
♥ Why do people whose existence you are unaware of, whom you meet once and will never see again, come to play, behind the scenes, an important role in your life?
♥ "I should have got in touch with you before now, but I had rather a turbulent life..."
She had just used the perfect tense, as though her life were over.
♥ If he were to repeat this to her, she would show huge surprise. She would shrug and she would reply to him, "He must be confusing me with someone else," or else, "And you believed him, Jean dear?" And perhaps she would be genuine. In the end, we forget the details of our lives that embarrass us or are too painful. We just lie back and allow ourselves to float along calmly over the deep waters, with our eyes closed. No, it is not always a matter of deliberate forgetfulness, a doctor whom he had engaged in conversation had explained to him, in the café below the blocks of flats in square du Graisivaudan.
♥ But sitting beside her here, on the sofa, Daragane did not yet know these details. We discover, often too late to talk to them about it, an episode from their life that a loved one has concealed from you. Has he really hidden it from you? He has forgotten, or more likely, over time, he no longer thinks about it. Or, quite simply, he can't find the words.
♥ She preferred to talk to him about the present, and Daragane understood this very well. He wondered whether this woman was the same person whom he had known, as a child, at Saint-Leu-la-Forêt. And as for himself, who was he? Forty years later, when the enlargement of the passport photograph would fall into his hands, he would no longer even know whether that child was himself.
♥ "What are you thinking, Jean dear?"
She was leaning her head on his shoulder, and Dragane wanted to tell her that he was thinking about "the last of the Condés", about school and about walks in the forest. But he was afraid she might reply: "No... You're wrong... I haven't any memory of it." He, too, during these past fifteen years, had eventually forgotten everything.
♥ He was taken aback. It would have been better to tell Dr Voustraat the truth. Now, it was too late. He should have done so earlier, on the doorstep. "You looked after me, a very long time ago, during my childhood." But no, he would have felt like an imposter and as though he were stealing someone else's identity. That child seemed like a stranger to him now.
♥ Daragane sensed a surge of dizziness welling up inside him, the kind that affects you when you are on the brink of confessing to something that will alter the course of your life.
♥ It would appear, he often used to say to himself, that children never ask themselves any questions. Many years afterwards, we attempt to solve puzzles that were not mysteries at the time and we try to decipher half-obliterated letters from a language that is too old and whose alphabet we don't even know.
♥ He lacked the courage to go into the house. He preferred that it should remain for him one of those places that have been familiar to you and which you occasionally happen to visit in dreams: in appearance they are the same, and yet they are permeated with something strange. A veil or a light that is too harsh? And in these dreams you come across people you once loved and whom you know are dead. If you speak to them they don't hear your voice.
♥ But, often, the voice and the laugh were those of a man whom he had never met in the house during the daytime. This man must have left very early in the morning, long before school. Someone who would remain a stranger until the end of time. Another more detailed memory came back to him, but effortlessly so, like the words of songs learnt in your childhood and that you are able to recite all your life without understanding them.
♥ He had even questioned a man with grey hair who ran a restaurant on the beach. "That must be the old Villa Embiricos on Cap Estel..." He had jotted down the name just in case, but when the man added, "A Monsieur Vincent had bought it during the war. Afterwards it was impounded. Now, they've turned it into a hotel," he felt afraid. No, he would not return to places for the sake of recognising them. He was too frightened that the grief, buried away until then, might unfurl through the years like a Bickford fuse.
♥ In the night, when she speaks on the telephone in the bedroom next door, he can hear only the sound of her voice and not the words. In the morning, he is woken up by the rays of the sun that peep into his bedroom through the curtains and make orange patches on the wall. To begin with, it is almost nothing, the crunch of tyres on the gravel, the sound of an engine growing fainter, and you need a little more time to realise that there is no-one left in the house apart from you.