"[B]ut what she said." [end of text] — Kafka, "The Castle"

Modiano, is, in some way, the opposite of Handke: we sense he is always making a mistake (Handke writes "Deep Blue"). Our author is constructing a story of loss whose heroines, unlike in Sebald (Austerlitz), are not stored in carbonic (maid) nor celluloid (mother). Here, we are seeking the Polaroid, going after the (ephemeral) magazine, recalling the issue our chief character borrows with a promise and fails to return. A history of magazines not returned. Nobody seems to ask any questions. Eager to believe. He is always responding 'yes' as if at a séance or motivational interview. And we sense our narrator has never actually left that office full of books of faded directories bequeathed at the outset of his journey - playing, instead, an Oulipian game of construction: semantic connections, constellations (and makeup) on empty space.

But this is just a kind of bad writing (there are good and bad ways to do Oulipo), arising from the space of imagination and always making a mistake. Among those we know to practice confabulation (I am seeking a less pejorative term), O'Connor's efforts are most frail, Joyce Carol Oates a little better with history to stand on, Murnane's are more complex (Because he is always scraping the imaginary landscape to the bone. (This is how, at his most successful, we are occasionally getting the so-called Murnane-sentence, hardly more than a phrase, which is trying to go a little deeper.)) It sometimes takes more imagination to do nothing at all. Modiano, who has surely read Kafka (The Castle), may have done better to cut our novella short mid-sentence during that scene adrift in the Swiss Alps (also the halting point of my memory of the text). ( )

Patrick Modiano est l’écrivain de la mémoire et de l’identité. Ce livre en est l’expression parfaite puisqu’il met en scène une personne amnésique qui tente, par le regard des autres, de comprendre qui il est. Un roman duquel il ne faut pas attendre de réponses, plutôt la description toujours un peu floue d’un mal-être persistant. J’ai lu (ou plutôt écouté) ce roman en apnée, avec l’envie d’arriver au bout pour enfin réussir à en sortir la tête pour reprendre ma respiration.

Quien es el hombre que ha estado trabajando de detective como socio en una agencia en el centro de París, desde que perdió su identidad en una localidad limítrofe con la frontera de Suiza. Todo estos años atrás esta duda ha estado presidiendo su vida hasta que como consecuencia de la jubilacion de una de las partes de la sociedad, decide emprender las pesquisas con las que tratara de reconstruir su pasado y mediante ejercicio de introspeccion recomponer su desdibujado perfil personal. Con este propósito se sucederán las entrevistas con diferentes personajes que supuestamente en algún momento pretérito de su vida actual tuvieron relación con quien fue. En el transcurso de esos encuentros recibirá diferentes reliquias con las que pieza a pieza completara un puzzle en el cada pieza representa un momento olvidado en el túnel del tiempo, o mas propiamente dicho un recuerdo desordenado que hay que ubicar en una coordenadada correcta en el mapa recuerdo/tiempo.

Intressant historia som börja bra. Men när berättelsen utvecklas blir det lite rörigt och vagt i kanterna. Mer intressant än bra. ( )

As always: retracing memories, retracing lost people, places, lifes and finding a person; oneself. As always, a masterpiece from an author that has become essential for me. (Read a Swedish translation.) ( )