Sleep of Memory

Starred review from August 20, 2018
A classic Modiano novel from its very first scene, which opens on the quays of the Seine in a bookseller’s stall, the Nobel winner’s latest is a startlingly beautiful excavation of his classic themes. A writer in his 70s looks back—and fixates—on a few small scenes from his life, noirish minutiae that haunt and captivate him 50 years after the fact. As a young man left largely directionless after years of boarding school and neglect from his selfish and itinerant parents, the narrator meets several women who change the course of his interior life. Among them are Geneviève Dalame, a charming woman from an equally complicated family; Madeleine Péraud, a mystic who hosts him in her lavish apartment to discuss their shared fascination with the occult; and Martine Hayward, a friend who has committed a violent crime and needs someone with whom she can disappear for a while. The narrator is good at disappearing, flitting in and out of people’s lives, as are each of these women, and after five decades, he still cannot shake the impressions of small moments with each of them, the simultaneous intensity and commonplace-ness of running into one of them on the street. Modiano sharply chronicles the intricate geographies of Paris, and the intimacies and legacies of fleeting scenes that happen within it: “Many paths led away from that crossing, and I had neglected one, perhaps the best of all.... Paris is studded with nerve centers and the many forms our lives might have taken.” For fans and newcomers alike, this is Modiano at his very best.

August 15, 2018
A languid, novelistic portrait of the artist--winner of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2014--as a young man."Those people you often wonder about, whose disappearance is shrouded in mystery, a mystery you'll never be able to solve--you'd be surprised to learn that they simply changed neighborhoods." So writes Modiano (So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood, 2015, etc.), a master of postwar noir, blending Alan Furst's matter-of-fact cynicism with Camus-ian aphorism. Here, he reflects on the era when, not yet 20, it began to dawn on him that women are very interesting creatures and that not everything is as it seems. "In the winter of 1964, in one of those dawn cafés--as I called them--when any hope seems warranted as long as it was still dark, I would meet up with a certain Geneviève Dalame." Geneviève is a woman of parts, into the occult, who knows odd things and people; she lives in a hotel, gets up even earlier than the dawn café-haunting Modiano, and isn't above smuggling interesting things (e.g., the log of an Edith Piaf recording session) out of the office to show him. The time seems fraught with--well, if not danger, then certainly change. As the author observes, it was a time when an old world was drawing to an end and a new one was about to be born, in which people no longer lived in hotels and joined Gurdjieff study groups. Geneviève is not without her own dangers, including a junior-mobster brother who threatens Modiano. And so are other women, one of whom, "whose name I hesitate to write," just happens to "accidentally" shoot a mobster. Half a century later, they are all memories receding into the past, with no madeleine but silence to recall them.A future biographer won't be able to build much of a timeline of the events Modiano so evocatively describes, relics of a world that no longer exists. An elegant work of suggestion and misdirection.

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December 1, 2018

Paring down his enduring themes and pristine, elusive style to their essentials, Nobel Prize winner Modiano delivers yet another understanding of memory. An older man looks back at several young women he knew when he was coming of age, e.g., sophisticated Madeleine Péraud, lonely Madame Hubersen, and especially Geneviève Dalame, troubled by a difficult brother. He's inspired by a book he spots on the quays, The Time of Encounters, and indeed those were just encounters--these women brushed against him, marking him lightly before disappearing, often simply because they moved to another address. What's more significant for both narrator and reader is the view of a callow young man growing up, recognizing how little his parents matter, and eschewing mentors to find his own way. One shocking event winds its way into the narrative, but as Modiano shows, even shockers are muted by time. VERDICT Transparent reading for happy fans that won't overwhelm new readers.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2018
Modiano's first book since winning the Nobel Prize in 2014, a bestseller in France and finely translated here by Mark Polizzotti, is a dream-like detective tale set in Paris. The older narrator tracks his younger self and doesn't try to bridge the gap between who he was and who he has become. The abyss really can't be bridged, after all, and to attempt to do so would be dishonest: The narrator reports on chance encounters, visits old neighborhoods, hangs around places he once had good reason to haunt, and recalls, with some trepidation, his involvement in what may have been a murder. Modiano was born in 1945, the story begins in the 1960s, and its conclusion coincides with the end of the era when people lived in hotels. The young Modiano was, like so many others, always in temporary digs and bent on escape, but whether towards or away from life it is impossible to say. This darkly evocative novel of one man's troubling past brings a line from poet John Ashbery to mind, One whiffs an era's bad breath. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)