Sundays in August

Starred review from June 19, 2017
Nobel Prize–winner Modiano (Suspended Sentences) does more with less in this subtle and haunting noir. He places the reader in uncertain terrain from the outset, as his unnamed narrator has an unexpected encounter in Nice with a man he hates and hasn’t seen in seven years, Frédéric Villecourt. Villecourt is now selling coats and jackets on the street, and the pair have an enigmatic conversation about a woman named Sylvia, who lied to the narrator about having married Villecourt. After they part, the narrator, whose ambitions to be a successful photographer have resulted in a dead-end job running a garage that’s about to go out of business, is curious about Villecourt, but subsequent efforts to locate him are fruitless. Flashbacks incrementally reveal something of the narrator’s past with Sylvia and their attempts to sell a diamond necklace known as the Southern Cross that they somehow got hold of. Modiano makes the reader work to put the puzzle pieces in order, while maintaining a convincing atmosphere of tension and dread.

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.

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