Sundays in August

Hello Gentle Reader

Youth has few qualities. Everything about youth is transient and impermanent. Youth as a state of existence is ethereal and ephemeral. It’s a time of only adjustment and just coming into one’s own. There is nothing concrete about youth. However, it is highly immortalized by the bitter sweet fragrance of nostalgia that wafts off it. As one ages they review and take stock of their life. When one is young, they can only dream and plan for a future that has yet to form. Some make it, while others do not. Some plan, while others merely stumble and party on to another great adventure. Some never make it. In one’s old age they attribute qualities to their youthful time. It’s all they can do. After all, memories themselves are distrustful and not accurate depictions of events which have previously transpired; they after all become faded around the peripheral edges; and much like Polaroid’s disintegrate into the oblivion of time now lost. Memories themselves are dishonest and distrustful. They are tainted by external forces and factors. Not to mention the innate desire to relive the glory and relinquish the insignificance. Those who praise the pass with engaged endearment often speak of: the good ol’ days; or the golden days; or in better times. They fail to truly take a panoramic view of the situation, or the former situation, and realize the only reason those times were better or golden, are because they were young then, and by extension full of energy and vigor, and had no time or commitments. Essentially: freedom. Beyond the attributes offered and allocated to these memories, youth in itself has few and minimal qualities, beyond its concepts of freedom, vigor, and time.

Patrick Modiano has been praised as a writer preoccupied with the big themes of literature: time, memory, amnesiac induced by national shame, personal oblivion, and the abandonment of aging; the absence of connections, and the gnawing emptiness of existence. Patrick Modiano is one of France’s most prolific authors. Which is not surprising, considering the size of a typical Modiano novel is quite short; rarely do they exceed two hundred pages. Despite his prolific nature and short novels, Modiano was not a well-known author in the English language until after he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in two-thousand and fourteen. After receiving the golden kiss from the Nobel, Modiano found himself thrust into the international spotlight, as readers everywhere began to pour over the books of one France’s best kept literary secrets. Unlike Michel Houellebecq and Christine Angot, who are known for their public statements, operatic gestures of discontent, controversial behaviors, opinions, commentaries, and perspectives, and lack of social conventions and graces; Patrick Modiano is quiet, reserved, and discreet his in his engagement with the public. He has rarely given interviews, and has often kept his opinions to himself or at least tucked away in private. He has never been author to cause controversy, or be accused of some ill-mannered behaviour. Yet despite the author avoiding unrestrained displays personal exorcism or public exhibition of character flaw and existential vitriol; his novels are known for being personal and often infused with personal experiences and tropes reminiscent of his own unfortunate childhood and squandered family history. Due to his preoccupations with time, memory, and the sensation that his novels are haunting and ghostly remnants of one another, and his characters each exist in an ethereal and intangible purgatory, with the river of oblivion continually flowing and circling around their solitary island of memory, where they starve off the white wash touch of times erasure, and relish in their personal obsessions and unanswered questions, all the while being completely alienated and isolated from their fellow men.

Perhaps one of the reasons Patrick Modiano was not well revered and reviewed in the English language before the Nobel, is due to his style. He is not a stylistic writer, riddling his sentences with poetic pomp or using language in linguistic feats of acrobatics. His writing style is straightforward and plain. This means, those who love the pretentious and the peculiar ostentatious experimentation, would most likely turn their noses up at the thought of reading a book with such reserved language and no formalistic attempt at experimentation. The other reason Modiano may have been overlooked in the English language, is he is not well known for his narratives. Patrick Modiano is no lyricist and he is not epicist either; there are no large scale battles between good and evil, or grand gestures of heroism. Yet, the novels would not be called or identified as quiet understated plots of garden realism either. Modiano’s novels are atmospheric riddles, questions are asked, proposed, and pondered—but rarely answered. This has often led to Patrick Modiano being compared to noir crime writers, such as Raymond Chandler, Dorothy B. Hughes, or Derek Raymond. Yet again though Patrick Modiano moves away from their traditional tropes, of hardened and down on their luck detectives sustain themselves via a liquid diet of cheap scotch and brooding vengeance. Modiano appears lighter on the surface, more airy and haunted, proposing questions of a haunted and elusive nature, riddled with abrupt departures, chance meetings, unhappy circumstances, abandoned surroundings and eclectic objects. Yet each perceived piece of the puzzle is an oddity that lacks place and partner. As many questions are posed and proposed, there are few answers, and only more questions begin to bellow out the more the characters seek to find resolve and an ending for their perilous conundrum of memory and reality. These preoccupations with memory and the art of remembrance have often brought on comparisons to Marcel Proust, the great French writer whose obsessive preoccupations of time, memory, and the art of reminiscent, forced the frail asthmatic author to document and writer one of the longest novels of recent memory. Yet the two authors could not be any more different once again, with Marcel Proust favouring long winded and winding sentences where memories ebbed and flowed, bringing with treasures, driftwood, messages, and long forgotten trysts. On the contrary Patrick Modiano’s style is clipped, fragmented and distrustful, whereupon it is always questioning and seeking validity or answers to an otherwise surreal and unsure world, populated by shadows, fading light, and dubious characters who melt and fade both into time and the landscape—making one question if they have ever existed at all.

“Sundays in August,” has been called the most noir novel Modiano has written—or at least been translated into English. It shows his range of style while he tackles his usual preoccupied themes. Rather than setting the novel in his usual stomping ground of Paris, Modiano sets “Sundays in August,” on the French Riviera, specifically: Nice. Amongst the extended light, the sparkling azure coast, the beaches riddled with tourists and topless sunbathers and speedo clad men bronzing, their lurks more shallow and shadowy people, who use the front of a tourist populated locale as a way to execute their schemes, con the unexpected, and drift away before their cruel and cunning deeds can be noticed and notified. Everything in Nice is as transient and intangible, people come and people go, while a fresh new boat of individuals or tourists will quickly fill the gaps and voids. One can quickly blend into Nice as just another passing waif or shadow amongst the sun, sea and sand. That is exactly what Jean and Sylvia wishes to do. If they can’t disappear, then they will simply melt and blend in amongst a crowd of aimless faces. Yet, with much of Patrick Modiano’s work there is the foam of moral ambiguity resting like foam on the surface. We quickly come to understand that Jean and Sylvia are not as innocent as they think they are. After all who walks with casual grace publicly while being saddled with a hug diamond necklace, called the Southern Cross? Which leads one to ponder and wonder about how two young people acquired a certain jewel of such exuberant expense? Then enters a shady character by the name of: Frédéric Villecourt; who the reader meets early in the novel along with Jean, both men reduced to mere shades of their former youthful glories. Villecourt has been reduced to peddling as a street vendor leather coats and accessories on the plazas and streets of Nice. Jean seems to exist in a state of stasis and emptiness as he recollects and recounts his experiences and ventures of the years prior with Sylvia. Though one begins to wonder, did either man truly love Sylvia? Or is Jean merely reflecting on his lost youth, his missed opportunity to take the photographs for his planned book about the rivers of the Rivera, and by extension elegizing missed opportunities, squandered time, and fading prospects. Then one ponders and inquiries about who Sylvia was or is—in typical Modiano fashion is cold, aloof, and draped in her own mystique.

“Sundays in August,” is cloaked in a noir like atmosphere, against the bronze shimmering sunny scene of the French Rivera, where two youthful people are on the run and in hiding as they have stolen a precious jewel. They are of course being perused (a term in Modinao’s world should be used with extreme lightness) by those who have a vested interest in the jewel; in this case the estranged ‘husband,’ of Sylvia, Frédéric Villecourt. Then there is the ambiguous and glamourous couple, Mr. Neal and Mrs. Neal; who also show a particular interest in the stolen jewel and by extension the two youth. However, in Modiano’s hands, what would be fast paced plot of action and intrigue, is slowed down to a brooding crawl, as one reviews, reminiscences, and questions the events of the past and their repercussions now into the present. One is left unsure of the sequence of events that has led to the present situation, with numerous gaps and questions salt and peppered throughout, leaving one wonder what happened to Sylvia, the Neals, and Madame Villecourt, not to mention the Southern Cross. Modiano offers no explanation. As with all his novels, readers are to always be forewarned about Patrick Modiano, and how his novels brew, steep and simmer, more than they boil and froth. The preoccupation is atmosphere and questions, but there are few answers and no real concluding act. Everything fades and dims, as both narrator and reader are left to contemplate and deliberate the minimal events that have led them to the empty present.

With a forlorn gaze, Patrick Modianos’ narrators look back and take stock of a time which has led to their current situation. They seek to grasp the elusive vapor of their misspent and now departed youth, a time of transient and shadow. The people come and they go. They waltz in one minute, and drift out the next. Their whereabouts, their situations, their eventual predicaments are left up in the air as questions of whether or not they’ve made something of themselves, or if they are happy, or even if they are alive. Despite not being a narrative focused author and not a great formalistic and stylistic author, Patrick Modiano is still a bewildering and enjoyable writer. His work is quiet and brooding, more inclined towards atmosphere and mystery, but lacking in any conclusive evidence to sate an appetite demanding a conclusion. The enjoyment of Patrick Modiano comes from his lack of commitments to endings or beginnings. One is left to curiously mull over the lives and the endings of the characters, and wonder whatever happened to them. Some lack the patience for such nonchalant deliberations, and would rather see everything conclude and justice be served. Yet, in Modianos’ world, justice is in short supply and flawed anyway. Everything fades and dims, until it’s completely vanished. All that remains are open ended questions that evade any semblance of an answer. To read Patrick Modiano is to drift alongside the characters as they take stock of their understated shipwreck of a past or life, and wonder where I all went wrong.

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader

Take Care

And As Always

Stay Well Read

M. Mary