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Dora Bruder is a little book about mostly nothing. It's the story of a man who finds a girl's name in a newspaper, dated December 1941, French Occupation in full swing, and notes that he himself had once walked countless steps past the spot where this girl used to live. So begins the link between Modiano and Dora, and Modiano's successive attempts to uncover more of Dora's story. The novel doesn't have a traditional narrative arc, and it's mostly composed of wanderings, of rememberings, always of, "j'ignore" - but there's something incredibly fascinating and incredibly melancholy about these measly hundred plus pages: perhaps it is the feeling of chasing a phantom. What an entrancing pursuit, what a desolate one.

And chase phantoms is exactly what Modiano does. Dora Bruder fell out of history, and Modiano fished out what parts he could from whatever mentions of her name remained. He bases his story on a couple of birth certificates, multiple photos, letters, endless police records, and, of course, the streets of Paris. Memories of his own adolescence and his father's life find their way into the narrative, and it's uncanny, really, to see how closely run the parallels of all our lives.

I can't put my finger on it: why, when the book concerns itself mostly with admitting, "I don't know, I will never know," that the story remains so touching. We feel as though we practically know Dora, and yet all we have to work with are her address and dates of arrests, incarceration, deportation... There are parts which reproduce letters addressed to the police bureau, letters which contain numerous pleas to release my child, release my grandparents, inquire as to the location of my fiancee... Letters oddly courteous and full of false hope. Perhaps this is it: all throughout the book, the phantoms we chase are waving their hands, holding lights into the night, and we wish we could go back and help them, or greet them at least, but they are too far gone for it to be of any use.

Modiano doubtlessly puts it better than I (be warned, my translations are mostly literal and probably bad): "Je lance des appels, comme des signaux de phare dont je doute malheureusement qu’ils puissent éclairer la nuit." (I launch my appeals, like signals from a lighthouse that I doubt are able to illuminate the night.) "Le béton de la couleur de l’amnésie..." (Concrete the color of amnesia.) "...les noms résonnent d’un écho lugubre et sentent une odeur de cuir pourri et de tabac froid." (The names resound with a dismal echo, smelling of rotten leather and cold tobacco.) Strange, but exciting, I think, that a book should succeed by speaking only of all things lost, all things buried beneath the winter of time.