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Endlessly Wandering the Streets of Paris

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Auteuil in Paris’s 16th Arrondissement

Of recent French authors, the one I am most addicted to is Patrick Modiano, winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature. Since I first read his Out of the Dark (1998) for an Internet French Literature group ten years ago, I have read most of his work and am still hungry for more, though there are only a few titles left to go. And, no doubt, I will probably start re-reading them.

Scene of the Crime (2021) is one of his most recent novels, which I just finished today. Jean Boesman experienced some fascinating but very dicey people back in the 1960s and is haunted by the memory. He has been sought after by several of them for knowing where some swag from past smuggling has been hidden, but he successfully avoids them. Nonetheless, he still endlessly goes over his relationship with the young women in the group. As he says at one point, “We are from our childhood as we are from a country.”

That country was the Paris of the 1960s and 1970s. I cannot read Modiano without a map book of Paris on my lap, following his characters wanderings and evasions through the most walkable city on Earth.

In Scene of the Crime, I tracked Boesman through Boulogne-Billancourt (where Modiano was born), Auteuil, Pigalle/Place Blanche, the Quays along the Seine, and Saint Lazare.

None of Modiano’s books are particularly long: Most can be completed in one or two sittings. I usually take a little longer, because I am following the action on a map of Paris.

On the Rue de l’Aude

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The Rue de l’Aude in the XV Arrondissement of Paris

I am fatally in love with the novels of Patrick Modiano. This evening, I re-read his The Black Notebook, published in France in 2012 as L’Herbe des nuits. His fatally lost characters end up wandering the streets of Paris, trying to recover lost memories. Meanwhile, I try following their path using an old copy of Paris Pratique par Arrondissement.

The following is from page 75 of my Houghton-Mifflin edition:

And I was afraid I would be waiting for her in vain that night. Then again, I often waited without knowing if she’d show. Or else she would come by when I wasn’t expecting her, at around four in the morning. I would have fallen into a light sleep, and the sound of the key turning in the lock would startle me awake. Evenings were long when I stayed in my neighborhood to wait for her, but it seemed only natural. I felt sorry for people who had to record appointments in their diary, sometimes months in advance. Everything was prearranged for them, and they would never wait for anyone. They would never know how time throbs, dilates, then falls slack again; how it gradually gives you that feeling of vacation and infinity that others seek in drugs, but that I found just in waiting. Deep down, I felt sure you would come sooner or later.

The Swan

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French Poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Today, as I was re-reading Patrick Modiano’s The Black Notebook (2012) with its labyrinthine reconstructions of an imperfectly remembered past, I thought of a poem by Charles Baudelaire that gave me the same feeling, It is called “The Swan”:

The Swan

I

Andromache, I think of you! The stream,
The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days
Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief,
The lying Simoïs flooded by your tears,
Made all my fertile memory blossom forth
As I passed by the new-built Carrousel.
Old Paris is no more (a town, alas,
Changes more quickly than man’s heart may change);
Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
The _débris_, and the square-set heaps of tiles.

There a menagerie was once outspread;
And there I saw, one morning at the hour
When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
And the road roars upon the silent air,
A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.
And near a waterless stream the piteous swan
Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust
His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while
Filled with a vision of his own fair lake):
“O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?
Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?”
Sometimes yet
I see the hapless bird — strange, fatal myth —
Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up
Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens,
With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face,
As though he sent reproaches up to God!

II

Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.
New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,
And suburbs old, are symbols all to me
Whose memories are as heavy as a stone.
And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul,
The image came of my majestic swan
With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime,
As of an exile whom one great desire
Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you,
Andromache! torn from your hero’s arms;
Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride;
Bent o’er an empty tomb in ecstasy;
Widow of Hector — wife of Helenus!
And of the negress, wan and phthisical,
Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes
Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog
The absent palm-trees of proud Africa;
Of all who lose that which they never find;
Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey grief
Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck;
Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade.
And one old Memory like a crying horn
Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost….
I think of sailors on some isle forgotten;
Of captives; vanquished … and of many more.

The translation is by F. P. Sturm.

Have You Read These 7 Authors?

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Lászlo Krasznahorkai (1954-Present)

Among my friends, I am known for the obscurity of my reading choices. In fact, I even split with one of my old friends because he thought most of my reading was not sufficiently dogmatic in a Marxist sense. Of course, he read about eight books a year, while I typically read somewhere between 150 and 160. Call me ugly, call me fat, call me vicious even—but don’t attack my reading choices.

Here are seven authors whose work I have read this year who are relatively unknown even to more literate readers, but they are all excellent writers. And several of them have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  • Ivo Andrić (1892-1975). Bosnian Serb.1921-1996) Nobel Prize. Most famous work: The Bridge on the Drina.
  • Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998). Swiss. Travel writer. Most famous work: The Way of the World.
  • George Mackay Brown (1921-1996). Scottish from the Orkneys. Poet and fiction writer. Most famous work: Collected Poetry.
  • Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995). American. Mysteries. Most famous work: Strangers on a Train.
  • Lászlo Krasznahorkai (1954-Present). Hungarian. Novelist. Most famous work: The Melancholy of Resistance.
  • Patrick Modiano (1945-Present). French. Novelist. Nobel Prize. Most famous work: Pedigree.
  • Derek Walcott (1930-2017). Caribbean. Poet. Nobel Prize. Most famous work: Omeros.

If you recognize two or more of the above writers, you have my congratulations. I have read multiple works of five of the above. I plan to read more by Bouvier and Walcott in the coming six months.

Serendipity: “A Pretty Girl with an Arid Heart”

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Patrick Modiano in 1968, the Year His First Novel Was Published

I have just finished reading the book whose cover is shown above. It is an autobiographical essay by a Nobel-Prize-winning (2014) author that covers the years from his earliest childhood to the publication of his first book in 1968. I believe I have mentioned elsewhere that Patrick Modiano is by far my favorite living French author. He is approximately the same age as I am, and I feel a unique kinship with him and his work. So far I have read six books by him, and I am just getting started.

His autobiographical essay Pedigree: A Memoir is painful to read. The author was raised—or I should rather say neglected by—two parents who did not particularly care to see him and shunted him off to various boarding schools, the farther apart from Paris the better. Below is a savage description of his mother, who was a small-time actress:

She was a pretty girl with an arid heart. Her fiancé [after her divorce from Patrick’s father] had given her a chow-chow, but she didn’t take care of it and left it with various people, as she would later do with me. The chow-chow killed itself by leaping from a window. The dog appears in two or three photos, and I have to admit he touches me deeply and that I feel a great kinship with him.

 

Nouvelle Vague

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Patrick Modiano, Winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature

To date, I have read five of Patrick Modiano’s novels and loved all of them. In order of publication, they are:

  • Missing Person (1980)
  • Young Once (1981)
  • After the Circus (1992)
  • Out of the Dark (1998)
  • In the Café of Lost Youth (2007)

With each of them, I felt I was back in the 1960s, in the world of the French New Wave (Nouvelle Vague), the Paris of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless and Giani Esposito in Paris Nous Appartient. Relationships are quickly entered into, but turn into quicksand. In After the Circus, we are not altogether sure of the main characters’ names. Describing his roommate, “Lucien” writes:

He had something in common with my father: they both wore suits, ties, and shoes like everyone else. They spoke unaccented French, smoked cigarettes, drank espresso, and ate oysters. But when in their company, you were seized by doubt and you felt like touching them, the way you rub cloth between your fingers, to make sure they really existed.

Earlier, he writes, “But topographical details have a strange effect on me: instead of clarifying and sharpening images from the past, they give me a harrowing sensation of emptiness and severed relationships.” That’s a good summary of the feeling of the novel: emptiness and severed relationships. “Lucien” is never sure when he parts from his girlfriend “Gisèle” that she will not just disappear forever into the warren of streets without a word of warning.

Fortunately, Modiano is a prolific writer, and many if not most of his works have been translated into English. Of the five novels I have read, I prefer the three most recent ones.

At the Café of Lost Youth

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Paris Café Scene, 1950s

Paris Café Scene, 1950s (Ed van der Elsken)

On the back cover of my New York Review edition of Patrick Modiano’s In the Café of Lost Youth was an intriguing blurb:

In the Café of Lost Youth is vintage Patrick Modiano, an absorbing evocation of a particular Paris of the 1950s, shadowy and shady, a secret world of writers, criminals, drinkers, and drifters. The novel, inspired in part by the circle (depicted in the photographs of Ed van der Elsken) of the notorious and charismatic Guy Debord, centers on the enigmatic, waiflike figure of Louki, who captures everyone’s attention even as she eludes possession or comprehension.

Naturally, I was intrigued and looked up the photos of Ed van der Elsken, of which I present two samples here. The above café scene is strongly suggestive of the Modiano book. The Parisian girls shown below are appealing images from a time long past:

Parisian Girls 1950s (Ed van der Elsken)

Parisian Girls 1950s (Ed van der Elsken)

One of the reasons I am drawn to Modiano’s work is that I am in love with Paris of the 1950s. I love the films (Melville, Chabrol, early Godard), the philosophy (Sartre, Camus), and now, with Modiano, the writers—even though he is writing retrospectively about the period over the last decade.

For more photos by Ed van der Elsken, click here.

 

“Fixed Points”

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Avenue Rachel, 18th Arrondissement

Avenue Rachel, 18th Arrondissement

There are two parts of Paris that I know fairly well from having stayed there for a few days in May 1997 and again a few years later. I couldn’t say exactly when because, for some reason, our arrival at and departure from Charles De Gaulle were inexplicably missing from my passport of that period.

During the first visit, Martine and I stayed at the Citadines ApartHotel on Avenue Rachel between Montmartre and the place de Clichy. Avenue Rachel is a one-block street that dead ends (how appropriate is that expression!)  at the main entrance to the Montmartre Cemetery. Opened in 1825 at the site of an old gypsum quarry, it was originally called the Cimetière des Grandes Carrières (Cemetery of the Grand Quarries). Buried therein were such notables as Hector Berlioz, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Edgar Degas, Theophile Gautier, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and many other luminaries.

Something brough the Avenue Rachel to mind this week: It was Patrick Modiano’s somber and brilliant novelette entitled In the Café of Lost Youth: “I had forgotten the silence and calm of avenue Rachel, which leads to the cemetery, slthough you never think of the cemetery, you tell yourself that at its end it must let out into the countryside, or even, with a bit of luck, onto a seaside promenade.”

I, on the other hand, was very aware of the street ending in a cemetery. From my hotel window on an upper floor, I would stare at the funerary statuary. I also got to know the immediate area pretty well, from the massive Lycée Jules Ferry, the Rue Caulaincourt with its bridge arcing over the necropolis, Place Blanche, and the nearby Moulin Rouge—all of which figure in Modiano’s story as locales where the heroine, if she could indeed be called one, was raised.

In a futile search for a patisserie, I tromped up and down the streets of the neighborhood. It was not a particularly picturesque area, known primarily for nude dancers and sleazy bars.

It was interesting to be reminded of the place. Such a short street. And yet so memorable!