Sleep of Memory by Patrick Modiano

French fiction

Original title –Souvenirs dormants

Translator – Mark Polizzotti

Source – personal copy

Am I the only one blogging-wise that you see you’re getting to a milestone? In this case, 1400 reviews on the blog are not wrong in 15 years of blogging, especially when the first few months I did very little, so I have averaged 100 books a year for the last 14 years. I have been trying to think of which book to pick, and then, in one of those weird things that happened, I ordered a few books from World of Books as I tried to move away from Amazon for my books. One of the publishers I love is Margellos World Republic of Letters, and I looked up books from them and ordered this book. Then this week looking for a podcast to listen to one morning whilst having a coffee out I listened to an old episode backlist on Patrick Modiano’s honeymoon. I then looked back and saw it had been a while SINCE I had reviewed him. I had reviewed Dora Bruder (search warrant) as before his noble win, it was the only book readily available, so I reviewed days before he won the Nopbel and then, in a couple of years after, reviewed a few more. I really liked his books so with the first wave of books post Nobel I reviewed a number nad then since not so many, which is a shame he is a writer I love his books have similar themes and subjects but are different enough to make them interesting. So this one of his most recent books has several things we expect from Modiano: a look back at war, Parents that are useless or have caused issues to the person in the book. Mysterious women. all are here.

Geneviève Dalame was always the first to ar-rive, and when I entered the café I would see her sitting at the same table, way in back, head bowed over an open book. She’d told me she slept barely four hours a night. She worked as a secretary at Polydor Studios, a bit farther down the boulevard, which was why we would meet in that café before she went to work. I had gotten to know her in an occult bookstore on Rue Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire. She was very interested in the occult. I was too. Not that I wanted to submit to a doctrine or become some guru’s dis-ciple, but because I liked mystery.

One of the women he knew over this time and had relationship with

The book follows a writer as he looks back at his early years, his teens to early twenties, and the woman he had met and had relations with over those years. Add to this, he is the son of a couple that had issues during the war years a nod to the trouble he had with his own parents as we see the odd collection of women he had meet over those years from someone interested in the occult. A woman floats through her life in a way an older woman, and maybe it is the death he may have been involved with one of the the ladies. Like in his other book, the exact facts of these women blend and drift as he remembers the crumbs left behind of his memory of each of them in vary amounts from the family friends he met when young to an almost Mrs Robinson-like lady several years older than himself, that he says he remembers very little of, but one thinks there maybe more. It is all set on the backdrop of post-war Paris, the awakening that happened in the sixties and eventually led to the events of 1968.

My memory of Madame Hubersen is also rather vague. A brunette of about thirty with regular features and bobbed hair. She used to take us to dinner near her building, in one of those streets perpendicular to Avenue Foch-on the left side of the avenue, facing away from the Arc de Triomphe. And here I am, no longer afraid to provide topographical details. I tell myself that this is all so far in the past that it’s covered by what the law calls amnesty. We would go on foot from her house to the restaurant that winter, a winter that was as harsh as the ones before it, next to which the winters of today seem rather mild; a winter like the ones I knew in the Haute-Savoie

Mike Scott has a song from his early years of TH Waterboys about his girlfriends. This is Modiano’s take on that, Jean. The narrator, as ever, is a thinly veiled Modiano; he, unlike Ernaux, mines his life, but this isn’t auto-fiction. This is Modiano fiction. He rips apart his life almost like Burroughs did with his prose. Modiano cuts out the events of his life, adds themes, and then switches them back together so we have a mysterious collection of Exs. One feels these are maybe exs but made to seem more than they were. As always, parents and the past war years are added. Through a little mystery about death and Paris, we have a Modiano book unique a feeling of over books but unique at the same time. He is the master of the crumbs of our lives. Those polaroids of the mind we all have fade in a way, and the actual taking of the event is lost in time sometimes. I think this is a fitting book to be the 1400 book I have loved the Nopbel prize, I am a huge fan of french fiction and Modiano is a writer I want to read all his books over time to build the full picture of this man and his life. Do you have a writer from whom you want to read all the books?

Winston’s score – A – has set me back into Modiano World, a Paris of the post-war years, remembered in many ways and with many women over time.