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Ever since, the Paris wherein I have tried to retrace her steps has remained as silent and deserted as it was on that day. I walk through empty streets. For me, they are always empty, even at dusk, during the rush-hour, when the crowds are hurrying towards the mouths of the metro. I think of her in spite of myself, sensing an echo of her presence in this neighborhood or that. The other evening, it was near the Gare du Nord.\


Memory, loss, despair and hope, human life wanders about these essential elements of man’s existence. For his whole life is merry-glum chronicle hopping on the fabric of time and space wherein he conjures up memories of loss from which surges up an air of despair, however he still keeps on moving hoping to make peace with memories, only to further plummet into the dark cervices of memory. And the famous or rather infamous events of the human civilization have been effecting our memories more than anything, for the greatest horrors make deep impressions. And those of us who were lucky enough to survive either type of cataclysmic events must have then begin the process of confronting and reconciling the memories of the catastrophe that befell them; and most of our poetry and art have taken birth as post-memorial commemorations of these catastrophic events. The memories associated with such events surge up out of our beings and perhaps get mingled with those of others but when our beings encounter such memories- which exists on their own and are self-conscious, such rendezvous may impart an allusion of completeness to them. The Search Warrant is journalistic documentation of the havoc created by the best manifestations of humanity in Europe, in which the author uses memory and time, digging into dark recesses of history to build up superbly moving narrative around travesty of human existence.





In writing this book, I am sending out signals, like a lighthouse beacon in whose power to illuminate the darkness I have, alas, no faith. But I live in hope.

Modiano’s narrator inserts himself into this fictive investigation as he scours the records, and streets, for this missing Jewish girl. His journey takes him to his father’s past, his own “running away�, and finally, to Auschwitz. In 1988 Patrick Modiano stumbled across an ad between the stock market report and a story of a school visit to Marechal Petain in the personal columns of Paris Soir from December 31, 1941: "We are looking for a young girl, Dora Bruder, 15 years old, five feet tall, round face, gray-brown eyes, gray sportscoat, burgundy pullover, navy blue hat and skirt, brown athletic shoes. Send all information to Mr. and Mrs. Bruder, 41, Boulevard Ornano, Paris."Placed by the parents of a 15-year-old Jewish girl who had run away from her convent school just before New Year's Eve, this ad set Modiano on a quest to find out everything he could about Dora Bruder and why she ran away from the Catholic boarding school that had been hiding her. He found only one other official mention of her name: on a list of Jews deported from Paris to Auschwitz in September 1942. With no knowledge of Dora Bruder aside from these two records of disappearances, Modiano continued to dig for fragments from Dora's past. What little he found in official records or through remaining family members, Modiano transforms into a meditation on the immense losses of the period--lost people, lost stories, and lost history. As he tries to find connections to Dora, Modiano delivers a moving account of the ten-year investigation that took him back to the sights and sounds of Paris under the Occupation and the paranoia of the Petain regime. In his efforts to exhume her from the past, Modiano realizes that he must come to terms with the specters of his own troubled adolescence. The result is a montage of creative and historical material that unfolds as a moving rumination on loss.

The parents lose all trace of their daughter and, on 19 March, one of them disappears in their turn, as if winter that year was cutting off from one another, muddying and wiping out their tracks to the point where their existence is in doubt. And there is no redress. The very people whose job is to search for you are themselves compiling dossiers, the better to ensure that, once found, you will disappear again- this time for good.

The narrative of the book peels off layer by layer, the facts and events, as they might have been taken place, to register absurdity of human existence wherein the human life itself has been reduced to insignias and numbers (Jewish dossier) as if they don’t have any say in the profound pirouette of time and space and their whole beings are plunged into well of nothingness. However, the beings of such unfortunate manifestations of humanity surge up from nothingness through the history of our dreadful pride but just as shadow of their former selves who are rising up from past to stare into our eyes and to put us in utter shame over our great acts of human injustice. And what could be done now since it may not change the fate of those who born brunt of our inhumane achievements, however it provides us great stuff to think about those ‘achievements�, for some lessons could be learnt from them, and though those unfortunate people have been reduced to documents of horrific history but some of the greatest examples of literature at least restore some of them, who were reduced to numbers and insignias, on space-time continuum through imaginative and journalistic endeavors of authors like Modiano.



In another part of Paris, when I was twenty, I remember having the same sensation of emptiness as I had had when confronted by the Tourelles wall, and without really knowing the reason why.


Once again, I had a sense of emptiness. And I understood why. After the war, most buildings in the district had been pulled down, methodically, in accordance with a government plan.

You feel a sense of profound emptiness while reading this book which is written in a style that is more like a journal, wherein characters are not given much space to be evolved, except for a few characters who are given an air of importance, but the very nature of the narrative create an atmosphere around loss and memory only to underline the inability of fiction to conjure up anything which may convey our appalling deeds lost in history. The use of time and memory in the book is second to none, repetition is also used deftly here perhaps since the book is written in the manner of a journal so to create a connect with the reader who, at times, may found him/ herself detached from the narrative. In a sense, it is not like a traditional novel, perhaps an anti-novel, in which Dora’s life is conveyed to the reader directly through journalistic details. The direct style of Modiano creates harrowing experience wherein the horrific details of holocaust are straightforward bombarded into your consciousness which plunges in the spell of grave emptiness which is felt inside your heart too and leaves you with a bitter taste. Of all the books I’ve read based of holocaust, The Emigrants by W.G.Sebald comes to mind after reading this book, only to find that while Sebald’s book is more vivid and picturesque, Modiano’s novel is like detective journal in which the author infused his imagination to conjure up this beautiful but unsettling narrative.

4/5
Recommended.