ŷ������

If you haven’t yet read any of Nobel Prize winner Patrick Modiano’s novels, Out of the Dark provides an excellent introduction. Modiano’s main characters—typically a late teen or early 20s male narrator, a late teens or early 20s mysterious and vaguely attractive woman, and one or more men perhaps in their mid-30s—appear slightly unfocused: it’s often unclear just how the young man and the young woman feel about each other, except for their need for mutual solace; their backgrounds are also often unclear; and the older men often support themselves through unspecified low-level grift. What is typically clear in Modiano novels is that the young man—now ten, twenty, or thirty years older—looks back with regret at his youthful romance, wonders what happened to the once young mysterious woman, and asks himself whether and how she cared for him.

Published in France in 1996 and reportedly Modiano’s fourteenth novel—comparing the chronological order of Modiano’s novels published in their original French with those translated into English is tricky��Out of the Dark was his most straight-forward and easily accessible novel to date. In most Modiano novels that I’ve read, the complexity and ambiguity of the plot and characters are belied by the seeming simplicity of his prose. Out of the Dark retains Modiano’s usual emblematic direct prose, usual structure, and many usual themes. It’s 1994 and the unnamed male narrator, now in his late 40s, wistfully remembers his romance of thirty years earlier. Both in 1994 and thirty years earlier, the narrator portrays himself as rootless and directionless: ”I don’t remember if I ever thought about the future in those days. I imagine I lived in the present, making vague plans to run away, as I do today. . .�� In 1964, the narrator found himself unmoored from a father eager to escape from him: ”My father used to meet me in back rooms of cafés, in hotel lobbies, or in train station buffets, as if he were choosing these transitory places to get rid of me and to run away with his secrets.�� On a Paris street, the narrator meets by chance Gérard Van Bever and Jacqueline, a young couple about his age. The narrator pieces together a marginal income by selling rare books to bookshops; Gérard makes money through playing the infamously high risk martingale technique at casino roulette tables; Jacqueline, always mysterious, supports herself through Gérard’s gambling. Gérard and Jacqueline seem a bit shady, a bit shabby, not à la mode shabby, just no-money shabby. The narrator, Gérard, and Jacqueline all live in a student neighborhood, hoping to pass beneath the radar because they were “always afraid of being noticed.�� The narrator, noticing the smell of ether in Jacqueline and Gérard’s room and the blue bottle above the sink, guesses that Jacqueline is addicted. Initially friends with Gérard and Jacqueline as a couple, the narrator starts an affair with her when Gérard goes off to gamble. The narrator and Jacqueline flee to England with money stolen from an older associate of Gérard’s, where Jacqueline ultimately disappears. How he loved her! ”One afternoon, at the Holland Park underground station, we had our pictures taken in a Photomat. We posed with our faces close together. I kept the pictures as a souvenir. Jacqueline’s face is in the foreground, and mine, slightly set back, is cut off by the edge of the photo so that my left ear can’t be seen. After the flash we couldn’t stop laughing, and she wanted to stay on my knees in the booth. Then we followed the avenue alongside Holland Park, past the big white houses with their porticoes. The sun was shining for the first time since our arrival in London, and as I remember, the weather was always bright and warm from that day onward, as if summer had come early.��

Fifteen years later and now in his mid-thirties, presumably about 1979, the narrator still finds himself isolated and adrift: ”I’d put the birth certificate back in my pocket. I was in a dream, and I had to wake up. The ties connecting me to the present were stretching. It would really have been too bad if I’d ended up on this bench in a sort of amnesia, progressively losing my identify, unable to give my address to passers-by. . . . Fortunately I had that birth certificate in my pocket, like dogs that become lost in Paris but carry their owner’s address and phone number on their collar. . . . And I tried to explain to myself why I was feeling so unfixed. I hadn’t seen anyone for several weeks.�� Sitting on the Paris park bench, he spies Jacqueline, now named Thérèse Caisley and married, speaks with her, and then she again disappears from his life.

Finally it's 1994, thirty years after his romance with Jacqueline, and the narrator wonders what’s become of Jacqueline and can find no trace of her: ”She might have died sometime in the past year. Maybe I would find her one Sunday on the Rue Corvisart.��

Jordan Stump, who translated Out of the Dark into English, beautifully sums up Modiano’s appeal: ”This is perhaps the most extraordinary of Modiano’s feats as a writer: however private his works seems, however inseparable from a personal past, it always speaks to us of something we feel we know, as if these were our own faded memories, our own shapeless uncertainties and apprehensions, our own loose ends. ��

I’ve now read more than a dozen Modiano novels—he’s become a favorite author—and I sometimes amuse myself by trying to picture the male and female leads in a film featuring a typical Modiano plot. The male lead is in his late teens or early twenties: slightly shy, bookish and thoughtful, dreamy and somewhat impractical, slender and perhaps barely handsome, dressed neatly in worn clothes. She’s about the same age: slender and neither tall nor short, pale, dark hair, wearing shabby clothes, with a veiled expression and neither smiling nor laughing easily, quietly attractive but not beautiful. Why can’t I think of actors to fill these roles?