Out of The Dark

Hello Gentle Reader

The nights are young. Therefore they are designed for the young. Yet it always appears that the nights are adulterated by the old. Such poor souls: aimless and wandering through the streets, in search of sleep and dreams; only to never find them. They can look under street lights, wall lights, porch lights. They peer around building walls; and into dark windows. Where could the sands of sleep be hidden? The same could be said for exhausting attempts at exhumation and excavation, of the past – especially a past wrapped in gauze or gossamer like fog. There are many pearls of wisdom, that are strung around the necks of scholars and sages, that reference the poetics of life; those simplistic guarantees. One: life (or the landscape of it) are guaranteed to change; Two: life goes on, with our without you. It is starting to understand and comprehend, that such simplistic terms and concepts, cause such large impacts. Personally I find myself blindsided, by emergences of the past. Coming across people from the past – acquaintances and friends, is at times a challenging experience. Where there was once common ground, has grown frail and weak with time. The slaying of imaginary dragons is a young man’s game; and certainly not up to either one of us, to participate in our dress shoes or heels; nor would it be considered appropriate to: ‘get down and dirty,’ in our slacks or skirts. Conversations are now, filled with discussions of: ‘where we are now?’ Polite conversations or small talk. All of which ends with the departing remark: ‘it was good to see you again.’ There is no denying, that our eyes betray us. More specifically our gazes do. They are absent and glossed over; as if we are fulfilling some duty bound obligation, to register each other’s existence. That is, if by chance, one of the two parties approach the other; and approaching the second party often, results in a slow timid saunter, wrapped in uncertainty and the smallest sense of guilt. Guilt with preconceived apologetic remarks: ‘sorry for not keeping in touch,’ ‘sorry it’s been so long,’ ‘sorry I haven’t contacted you lately.’ – Yet despite the admittance of ones guilt and the amends attempted, there are always rationalizations: ‘I’ve been busy,’ ‘You know me, living out of a suitcase, always traveling,’ ‘There just is never enough time in the day,’ or the best: ‘I was just thinking of you.’ Presumptuously I find my solution to be the best. It is best not to saunter over, or approach the corresponding party – even if they have noticed you. Do not linger too long, in such a shared presence; and it is high recommended to depart before recognition takes hold or immediately after. Still the hardest aspect about moving forward is the changing landscape. Where childhood hide ways are torn down or ripped out. Family homes sold. These are the most wistful and melancholic realizations that one’s own past, is slowly being erased, by time and age. This all becomes quite prickly and problematic, when one searches their own past; for hints and inclinations of their character, or who they are. Vantage points are removed. Decrepit landmarks torn down. Former allies of a shared past, departed and never heard from again. The names of residencies change. Suddenly the familiar becomes foreign.

Patrick Modiano, who became the two-thousand and fourteen Nobel Laureate in Literature, has been hailed, as an archival cartographer of faded memories, destroyed histories, and the continual search for identity in a world inadvertently afflicted with amnesia. It would seem that only from the past, do we begin to understand our present situations. As Proustian as this may sound, and as foreboding as it may appear; Modiano is not a writer of complicated sentence structures. Patrick Modiano is quite the opposite (despite ironically the compassions to Proust), Modiano’s prose is lucid and deceptively simple. His work is matter of fact, clipped of poetics, has no remnants of postmodernism to his work. Modiano’s work is not interested in literary gimmicks and word play for the sake of word play; as it is far more concerned with its genuine preoccupations with the past, and the personal sense of identity loss and crisis. However, one should not mistake Patrick Modiano, as a writer of simple drug store novels. One should never confuse lucid, with formulated simplicity; or length with complexities or lack thereof. Patrick Modiano’s work is complex in the minimal. His novels are short, elusive and ethereal. The authors novels, are wrapped in a gossamer like gauze, narrated by narrators, who begin their searches into a past, that has all but faded, or been neglected into depletion and decrepit disrepair; or by outsider narrators, who try to understand the pasts of others, who they meet by chance meetings. Such characters exclaim or evade, attempts at inquiring in their pasts; as if somehow they never had a past, and they had always existed in a perpetual purgatory of the present; despite the haunting inclinations of the past, of abrupt departures and unanswered questions. The novels themselves are autumnal in the present – vague attempts at remembering the fleeting instant scents of spring, in a world presently on fire around them, with the oblivion seeping in through the cracks of fraying leaves. Modiano himself has stated that he appears to continue to write the same book over and over again – or to go a step further in many critical claims: each new novel is a new chapter, in a larger novel as a whole.

“Out of The Dark,” is what one might call a typical Modano-esque novel. It is written in the moody dream like inconsequential prose of the author. The plot concerns a couple of drifters in their youth, and their own flotsam or jetsam attitude towards life; they come in with the tide, and depart with the wave; and the short affair that sprouted, in the intermission between the chance arrival and the abrupt departures. The novel is narrated by a man (a writer), who searches the past, for an inclination or a spark that may have existed; or may simply reside in a space, in which we choose that it does. This is the shadow play of memory; and Modiano’s work: the shadow space of the past, of what is remembered and what had happened. This leads to the dream like quality of the prose.

The plot of “Out of the Dark,” is created by a chance encounter. A young man aimless, living on off of the money he can earn by selling off his art books, to bookstores. Then by chance he meets a couple, in a cafe playing pinball, and their worlds intertwine with one another. The young couple’s lives are equally unstable, as they make a living off of gambling; more specifically roulette. Yet the world of this couple, and the world the narrator finds himself equally invested in, is a world of dreams and far flung thoughts – and no plan on how to achieve it. Jacqueline the woman, is aloof, cold and distant (much like the ether in a blue bottle) – dreams along with her ‘boyfriend,’ Gerard, to move to Majorca where an American writer friend resides. However the plan on how to get there, and foresight into such a venture, is left in the ambiguous gambles of chance, luck, and fate. Yet the narrator finds himself, more embezzled in the dream of the youthful sense of word: Drapetomania – what exactly has caused the urge, the inclination – to seek greener fields and pastures, it never elucidated upon any further. Yet when the plan is set in motion, complications arise, by the Modiano departure; an understated abrupt closing of the door. A door that is never re-opened, nor located – though attempts to locate, unlock and walk through, to find the answers create the entire novel. Such are the existential-noirs of Patrick Modiano.

When the Swedish Academy Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to Patrick Modiano, they had introduced or rather re-introduced a great writer, to the world. Patrick Modiano is an accessible writer, but beyond the lucidity of his prose, there is no luminous quality to the secrets, they attempt to uncover. Modiano is an approachable writer, and is a writer that can be read and enjoyed. But is by no means a beach read. Modiano is a writer, who is best saved for rainy days, when they chores can be procrastinated for another day; his work is equally grey and blue as the sky and the rain. From the point of the forgotten or what has been forgotten, Modiano has revisited, and cast light upon, a world that at times lacks qualities other than the time that it was in.

“We had no real qualities, except the one that youth gives to everyone for a very brief time, like a vague promise that will never be kept.”

That is perhaps the greatest summary of youth in its entirety, and subsequently the novel.

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
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And As Always
Stay Well Read
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M. Mary