The Birdcage Archives

Thursday 20 June 2019

Paris Nocturne


Hello Gentle Reader

A nocturne is a piece of musical composition that is traditionally performed at night. Frédéric Chopin, the famous Polish composer was renowned for his compositions in the nocturne musical genre. The word: ‘Nocturne,’ itself brings to mind a dichotomous image of contrary and contradicting impressions. On the one side: the succulent and sweet ripeness of summer evenings and nights, where the air is warm, but the earth has begun to cool. Shadow wraps their shawls around, while stars twinkle and wink in their silver ghostly ether realms, silent witnesses to a world in slumber.  These warm and intimate nights always belong to the young. Restless and sleepless, young lovers and admirers, wonder arm and arm, hands enclosed stalking along shadowed streets, which promise discretion and cover from onlookers and bystanders who can trade their rendezvous as a currency, or hold it for ransom. Here amongst the shadows, street lights, and celestial bodies’ overheads, they can exchange or steal ached but withdrawn kisses, without the tattling glare of the sun. These nights—the nights of these young lovers—must always come to an end. Yet among such sweet scents of flowers cooling in the evening, recovering from the blistering former day, they lay bare both heart and soul and profess their intentions without the scrutiny of an audience. Beneath the spotlight of street lamps, they exchange departing kisses while shadows pause on baited breath, while moths dance in a fluttering frenzy intoxicated on bewitching intimacy.  

On the divergent side of this twofold portrait is the unsettled landscape of the nocturne: the dirge and elegy of shadows, void and emptiness. A scene of extinguished flames followed by trails of swirling violet smoke, snaking in a glowing phosphorescent dark. The air is not perfumed by the cooling scent of flower perspiring in forlorn sweet.  No, the air is still and cold, covered in a shroud of silence, which rests within the stony claws of forgotten and nameless statues. The street lights and their afterglow from a thick gaze, and the sky rolls with burning nocturnal clouds, concealing stars and moon. Here and there salt and peppered leaves flee, as the autumn colours fall. In their wake lie naked twigs and branches, whose wooden bark beckons no more. Solitary cars trace their paths through the streets, their destinations unknown. Sole individuals with no company stalk, sulk and stumble down cracked and beaten pavement. Blooms of flowers remain stagnant, ripe with rot. Junkies seek cover in the scant remaining bushes who still have leaves. Insomniac philosophers converse and confess with solitary statues, who ignore the trivialities of mortality, but envy their freedom. Sirens wail in the distance. Someone is heading to the emergency room; while another is heading to jail. The lights of both paramedics and officers colour and flash through the landscape, a mixture of white and red, or blue and red. The only establishment open at this time are clubs and bars. The regulars are perched in their drunken stupors, cooing about better days—youthful days—while cawing at the state of the world and a bleak future. In the back corners, one can always find the anomaly to the establishment, they’re not regulars, and have never been seen before. They are served later and often last. Regardless, they nurse their drinks with novice naivety. They don’t whisper a word. Elsewhere in desolate flats another tosses and turns. Regret eats away at the night. The following day will be riddled with nocturnal depravation, restlessness, and of course sleeplessness.

Patrick Modiano’s “Paris Nocturne,” gravitates towards the second perspective of the nocturne; the one of waltzing shades, forlorn and foreboding shadows whispering secrets, which both irritate and intrigue, though they never betray their sources or their enigmatic treasures. “Paris Nocturne,” opens casually enough, with the a-typical Modiano narrator: an aimless young man wandering the streets of Paris in the dusk ridden hours after twilight. There is no backstory or information or clue or inclination as to why this narrator is directionless and drifting with haunting translucence through the streets of Paris. Unknown and unacknowledged are the survival traits of Modiano’s narrators and characters, and this narrator assumes and fits into the clinical profile already established with finesse. He is able to wear this fatalistic coat without complaint or issue. It droops and hangs. The leather is familiar and warm, infused with the scents of previous occupants. The narrator maintains his authorial gifted talents. He is able to blend and dissolve, sneak and pursue, spook and sleuth; he cannot allow buried bones to remain undisturbed or accept memory and its unrealizable narratives. Despite all his talents of savvy street smarts, his insatiable curiosity riddles him with faults; his interloping tendencies get the best of him, and his personal convictions for conclusions, only lead to consequence and questions. In this case: an immediate and freak vehicle accident occurs. No deaths, merely minor injuries. Yet it becomes the cataclysmic event which pulsates throughout the novel.

This particular accident makes an immediate appearance in the novel. Our narrator in his routine adrift ponderings crosses Place de Pyramides. From the dark of this plaza, a sea-green fiat emerges and unceremoniously is enroute for a collision course with narrator; it swerves out of the way but still strikes its target, before crashing into a nearby barricade. From there the driver—a woman by the name of Jacqueline Beausergent—and the young man are carted off in a van by a large man, and taken to a medical clinic. There in white walls, and a small room the two lay in adjacent beds, staring and wondering of the others fate. Our narrator is consumed in a dose of ether, and the mysterious Jacqueline Beausergent vanishes into the nebulous void of the night. Our narrator upon awakening from his ether riddled sleep finds the woman gone. The same large man who traveled with the two to the clinic, leaves the narrator plenty of money, and soon he too fades into the alleys and blackened corridors of Parisian streets. From there our narrator conducts a Modiano Odyssey, seeking out the catalyst: Jacqueline Beausergent and the other faded memories, which she dredges forth.

“Paris Nocturne,” traverses the familiar landscape of Patrick Modiano’s previous novels. The unreliable discontent of memory, the static and hazy amnestic blur of recalling events, a sense of aimless displacement with regards to similar surroundings, dubious characters with questionable motivations that dance within the shadowy recesses of society, and absent parents, or distant fathers who slip in before fading out once again leaving no trace of their ethereal and ephemeral existence, always evasive of detection; but also disappearing women—such as: Jacqueline Beausergent—who are enigmatic and cold to approach, who exist in and around the context, while retaining their position to the peripheral; as usual though these woman disappear often abruptly and with no reason; and finally there is that monochromatic metallic scent of ether; the blue wave of sleep, peace, and forgetfulness. All of these ticks are reached formulaically with “Paris Nocturne,” and yet despite this, Patrick Modiano maintains both engagement and enjoyment, despite these tropes reoccurring with reprised roles and chorus repetitions.

“Paris Nocturne,” however, does find itself dissenting from the routine parameters established in Modiano’s previous output. Character interaction varies in each novel. Some of Patrick Modiano’s novels, feature a few characters that orbit and interact with each other in a strange celestial cacophony, though their orbits are always doomed to fall apart in its astronomical imbalance; others are merely pass each other, exchanging a quick nod or salutation before carrying on. Intimacy or ‘deep rooted,’ connection is impossible. Each character always carries in their hand a suitcase of discretion, confidentiality, privacy and secrets, which ultimately ensures their departures are met with immediate urgency, with no flare or farewells. Yet, “Paris Nocturne,” eschews this, there is little interaction, little characterization, and only inclinations of dialogue and meetings. In his search of Jacqueline Beausergent, the narrator reminisces of his complicated childhood and his otherwise absent father, who participated in business transactions and activities of commerce which were always frowned upon by the law, meaning his father would often dispose of him at boarding school or leave him to his own devices, and once called the cops calling his son a vagrant to merely get rid of him. A mother is never mentioned. In this, Patrick Modiano does away with any notion of character interaction, and treads lightly when it does. In its place, Modiano enacts a fragmented narrative, which playfully disposes of the notions of time, making it irrelevant and inconsequential. The prose is lucid and simple, but often precariously skirting close to stream of consciousness, with its free associations and often paranoid state of delirium. Yet Patrick Modiano always reels it before getting out of control. Despite this the narrative still maneuvers with postmodern fragmentation through the miasma of corrupted memories, riddled with paranoia, to create a free associated quilt of events and incidents, which are haphazardly soldered together, in a makeshift sequence which provides no results. The corrupted father, the run over dog, the loss, the abandonment, it all circles around his fateful accident which has left him with greater stability at least financially, but more disillusioned than ever, and with a greater sense of alienation. Yet further questions arise throughout the novel. What about Dr. Bouviere, the faux pseudo-doctor parading philosophical guru like mantras, doctrines, and prescriptions of self-help perceptions. His dubious pantomime parading postures have ensured he came into contact with a less then appealing crowd. What part does he truly play? The narrator only attends his lectures, to find a clue or evidence to his ghostly siren. When asked in a survey if he would choose: “Do you want to change your life or rediscover a lost harmony?” the narrator answers: “rediscover a lost harmony.”

“Paris Nocturne,” is all about the discord and the cacophony, the rippling effects of a lost or disrupted harmony, now unobtainable. The past is riddled with vague and open ended questions. The future: uncertain. All the while the present resists being lived, and is painted in the shallow waters, offering only ghostly portraits of landscapes an in ink wash. “Paris Nocturne,” maintains the Proustian noir that Patrick Modiano has perfected. The novel formulaic remains riveting and interesting. It’s a short read (all the better), and adds yet another chapter to his oeuvre riddled novel, which remains unknown, yet harmoniously interacts within itself. This being said, “Paris Nocturne,” is different. It carries more paranoia, more delirium, more surreal discourse, and fragmented unreliability and corruption. The entire novel is filtered through the aimless and influenced perception of the narrator as he attempts to understand the accident, find his accident inducing siren, and freely associate the present with memories in order to produce some resemblance of meaning or logic, all of which resist his attempts of authority and control. Then again, life is a lot simpler then he thinks and or makes out to be; at least according to Jacqueline Beausergent. Though Dr. Bouviere states it’s merely an act as: “life is an eternal return.”

Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary

Saturday 1 June 2019

Best Translated Book Award Winner, 2019


Hello Gentle Reader

My apologies in the delay of finding this information, Gentle Reader; but the winners of this Best Translated Book Award for Fiction and Poetry are:

[Fiction]

Patrick Chamoiseau – Martinique (French Language) – “Slave Old Man,”

[Poetry]

Hilda Hilst – Brazil – “Of Death. Minimal Odes.”



“Slave Old Man,” by Patrick Chamoiseau is a worthy winner of this year’s award. It is neither vogue nor topical. Rather, it is a powerful novel exploring slavery and freedom, all through the narrative of a daring fleeing old slave man, pursued by his master and his hound, through the jungles of Martinique. The jungle begins to show its surreal and corrosive touch, by infecting and slowly twisting the notions of time and reality, into a surreal landscape touched by the hallucinogenic. It’s a vivid novel exploring the malice and humiliation of the slave trade through dehumanization and demoralization of the slaves themselves, while shining a light on the dark aspects of the Caribbean history.

A truly power, worthy and moving novel, befit for the Best Translated Book Award.

“Of Death. Minimal Odes,” by Hilda Hilst, once again surprises me. Again, Gentle Reader, I reiterate, I am not a poetry reader. At best, I am a distant admirer. Yet, I though Kim Hyesoon would receive the poetry award win with her poetry collection: “Autobiography of Death.” Hilda Hilst, the Brazilian poetry master walked away with the award, with her searing and difficult poetry collection: “Of Death. Minimal Odes.” The judges were amazed at the poet’s blasphemous tenderness, as she explored the tantalizing seduction of death, and its numerous layers. It’s a complicated work of Brazilian modernist and postmodernist poetry. Though most famous for her experimental and uncompromising works of prose, her first collection of poetry within the English language, has proven to showcase her talents for the provocative and the poetic, before she turned her gaze towards prose.

Congratulations to both Authors!


Thank-you For Reading Gentle Reader
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read

M. Mary