Such Fine Boys

September 1, 2017

Writing about the slippages of memory in cool, polished language, Nobel laureate Modiano always gives us stories we can't quite touch, but he does it somewhat differently every time. These recently translated novels are instructive to read together. Drawing on Modiano's boarding school experiences in the 1960s, Such Fine Boys introduces several characters recalling their lives at the prestigious but somehow creepy Valvert School outside Paris, where mostly rich children get dumped. One boy lives in a different apartment from his mother, which she's bought for him to protect her own privacy; another simply walks out on parents who ignore him completely. The boys' stories, which overlap to create a collective memory of their school days, are intriguing but seem to flatten out over the course of the narrative as the boys themselves amount to little; the title is bitterly ironic.

Sundays in August finds Modiano in true noir mode. The narrator meets a former acquaintance named Frederic Villecourt on the shady side of Nice, and they talk edgily of Sylvia, whom Villecourt keeps insisting loved only him. This encounter seems tawdry and inconsequential, but tension and mystery escalate grippingly as the narrative unfolds. Sylvia had in fact run away with the narrator, wearing a storied diamond necklace called the Southern Cross, and as they hole up along the Riviera, they encounter an enigmatic couple who aren't what they seem. What happens between Sylvia and the couple remains uncertain (precisely the point), but it creates moody and suspenseful reading. VERDICT Adventurous thriller fans will enjoy Sundays, adventurous fans of coming-of-age fiction will enjoy Boys, and fans of Modiano and literary fiction generally will enjoy both.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2017
The twentieth of Nobel laureate Modiano's (The Black Notebook, 2016) works to be translated into English, this novel traces the lives of accidental children, who belonged nowhere, and who grow old without growing up. Never innocent, the narrators are followers who look on while their classmates from the now-defunct Valvert boarding school grow dissolute. Could a generation be lost if they were never wanted in the first place? Modiano, who wrote the screenplay for Louis Malle's famous film Lacombe Lucien (1974), improvises on the film technique called a dissolve so that the impression this tale leaves is paradoxical, a series of disappearances or effacements that gently indicts the duplicity and futility of an entire generation. One character, Yotlande, wonders why certain people remain prisoners, well into old age, of a single year of their lives. Yotlande's musing is doubly poignant because he asks it of himself; he has no friends and no one he can talk to. J. M. G. Le Clezio, another French Nobel laureate, says it best in his foreword: This is at once the clearest, the purest, and the most complex of Modiano's novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)