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A writer discovers a set of notes in his notebook and sets off on a journey through the Paris of his past, in search of the woman he loved forty years previously.
Set in the Montparnasse district of Paris, the author, Jean, retraces his nocturnal footsteps around the left bank during France’s period of decolonisation during the 1960’s. He tries to remember what brought him into contact with a gang that frequented the hotel Unic in the area. His quest through seedy cafés and cheap hotels becomes an enquiry into a woman, Dannie, whom Jean loved and who once tried to admit to a terrible crime. Over the course of several voyages between past and present, we meet various shady characters, and discover that Dannie may have killed “someone”. As his memories overlap with the discovery of an old vice squad dossier, Jean reinvestigates the closed case of a crime where he could well be the last remaining witness.
Translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti
Editore : Quercus Publishing (12 gennaio 2017)
Lingua : Inglese
Copertina flessibile : 160 pagine
ISBN-10 : 0857054880
ISBN-13 : 978-0857054883
Peso articolo : 118 g
Dimensioni : 13.1 x 1.2 x 19.9 cm
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Super story. Totally worth it. My faith in Modiano keeps going up and up.
Paris in 1964. A city far less glamorous than that which we celebrate today, recovering from an extended war of independence with Algeria, tearing down buildings in marginal neighborhoods, and populated by many rootless youths who, lacking employment, engage in illegal activities and/or pass their days drinking in cafes and aimlessly wandering the streets of the capital. Welcome to the same peripatetic world of “flaneurs” who populated Patrick Modiano’s “In the Cafe of Lost Youth.” In that earlier novel, the plot focused on pinning down the background of the cafe habitue Louki who at the book’s end commits suicide. In “The Black Notebook”, meanwhile, the life of Dannie is examined by Jean, the book’s narrator, who was her occasional lover and a budding author. In this instance, a specific cafe does not act as the locus of activity, and we have instead a fixed group of men tied to Morocco (substituting for Algeria, presumably). At the same time, we are offered little knowledge of Dannie’s life in later years.As is common in most Modiano novels, key themes in “The Black Notebook” are the nature of memory and identity, and lyrical language describes visual perception as a metaphor for the clarity of memory. Time also plays a starring role, and this calls to mind Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet was the co-author and director of the enigmatic film “Last Year at Marienbad” and equally surrealistic novels such as his “The House of Rendezvous.” In “The Black Notebook” we have on page 75 the following passage: “They would never know how time throbs, dilates, then falls slack again….” And, at the end of the book, the narrator Jean notes that he “no longer saw a very clear distinction between past and present” and that he ‘had done nothing but walk, always in the same streets, to the point where time had become transparent.”
I was debating whether or not to try reading one of the Patrick Modiano books in the original French but decided that it would be better to become acquainted with his work in an English translation. I am glad that I decided to do this because the concept of this novella is so sophisticated. Tempting as the other books may seem, I think that you would need to be fluent to get by and therefore , unless you are confident with your French, the translation is good enough to appreciate why Modiano was a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. I would have to say that this book was totally gripping. It is immediately apparent that the principle narrator of the story is flirting with the under-World and that the fact that his girlfriend is tied up with something very sinister. This sets the background for the novella and is the basis upon which the lead charcter Jean muses about things. The whole account is told in the form of a recollection and whilst the story is on the face of it about his daliance with characters who have very shady backgrounds and ” a very serious incident” , what Modiano is really expressing is the fluidity of memory and how the past is recalled. I can appreciate that this book might not be for everyone but the writer at once conjures upis a noirish image of a part of Paris long since demolished with it’s bars full of nefarious characters and long-since disappeared hotels. It is difficult to put your thumb on what is exactly so appealing about this book. The writing is very beautiful and it is not too much of a leap of imagination to envisage this story as a moody, black and white film from the 1960s such as “Lift to the scaffold.” I felt that the descriptions and observations that really resonnated with me were sufficient to make this book compelling but this is also something of a mystery and you want to get to the end of the story simply to find out more about the enigmatic girlfriend Dannie. I would recommend this story to anyone who enjoys evocative and effective writing. My only reservation centred on the fact that Jean was an assidious keeper of records (hence the title of the book) yet he seems too infatuated with Dannie to note the reality of what is goin on around him. It is to the credit of Modiano that he maintains your attention throughout the book and despite the absense of any action or violence. I love the way that the author creates a story that maintains a fine balance between reality, perception and recollection. Whilst I think anyone anticipating a blood-thirsty policier, “The black notebook” actually flirts with this concept to produce something more powerful. When I finished this book I kept thinking what a rich source of mateiral this is to make a cracking thriller. I really enjoyed this book.
Reading this beautiful rendition of someoneâs experience in another time and another place is extraordinary in many ways, but frustrating too because it undermines the readerâs expectation that there will be a plot with developed characters, a denouement, a point. Reading this was like living someoneâs impressions. And as in life, there is no explanation, just the unknowableness of others who drift in and out of focus, the awareness of moving through time and space inconsequentially, of inhabiting a consciousness flowing parallel to the elusive interruptions of evanescent memories. The writer does reimagine the experience of time spent in down-to-earth 1960s Paris very evocatively, as he walks endlessly and moves from cafe to hotel to student accommodation – just existing as we all do. It is a beautiful book but also melancholy. In one moment our protagonist reflects that he has reached the age where life is just about living on, which made me terribly sad, because thatâs a realisation I share.
Modianoâs a very great writer, of that there is no doubt. I always thoroughly enjoy his books, I get right stuck in and read them start to finish pretty quickly, perhaps too quickly, because I never have much recall of the characters or what happened a few weeks later … This has happened with this one, and I think the fault must be mine. This book maybe repays more close studying than I gave it. Iâm left with a kind of haunted feeling, and thinking I will read it again.