Little Jewel by Patrick Modiano

French fiction

Original title – La Petite Bijou

Translator – Penny Hueston

Source – Personal copy

I just started on to another Modiano after reviewing Sleep of Memory the other day just as we went away, and that was it I read it whilst we were away I always take a pile of books, but we get an early start to get places when away have a full day wandering and buying bit places by the time we get back we just chatted and watch a bit of tv anyway this is a later Modiano written a couple of years before he won the Nobel prize ad is a new translator to me and also is from another publisher of his books Text. As ever, it is set in Paris.

IT MUST HAVE been about twelve years since anyone had called me Little Jewel. I found myself at Châtelet metro station at peak hour. I was in the crowd heading along the endless corridor on the moving walkway. There was a woman wearing a yellow coat. The colour of the coat caught my eye and I observed her from the back on the walkway. Then she headed down the corridor marked DIRECTION CHÂTEAU DE VINCENNES. Now we were all squashedagainst each other in the middle of the staircase, waiting for the barrier to open. She was standing next to me. I saw her face. She was so like my mother that I thought it must be her.

The opening lines of the book and Therese seeing the woman in the yellow coat

What happens when you lose your mother, then one day you are on a metro and think you see her in a yellow coat and decide you want to follow this woman? This is the heart of this story as we follow Little Jewel as she says no one had called her that since she was twelve so now nineteen, Therese has broken memories of her earlier life and when she follows this woman that may be her mother, those memories come to mind as we see her follow this woman everyday life. In the hope that she can patch together her own past.As is the woman, the countess that had died years earlier? What is her life, this mystery woman as ever we see place drift, and her memories and where we follow the woman mix this is one of the things he does so well place and feelings. He is a teen viewing the world, and as we see her trying to grasp what happened in the past to answer those questions, does she need the answers?

SOMETIME BEFORE THE evening when I thought 1 recognised my mother in the metro, I had met a person called Moreau or Badmaev at the Mattei bookshop on Boulevard de Clichy. It stayed open late. I was looking for a detective novel. At midnight, we were the only customers, and he recommended a title on the Noir list. Then we talked as wewalked together along the median strip down the boulevard. Occasionally, his voice had an odd intonation that made me think he was a foreigner. Later, he explained that Badmaev was the name of his father, whom he had hardly known. A Russian. But his mother was French. At that first meeting, he wrote his address on a piece of paper, under the name Moreau-Badmaev.

I like this looking for a detective novel is maybe a summing up of his style a novel looking to be a detective novel always .

As I said in the previous post on his bookmI feel Modiano has a bag of ideas that he uses, and he also has used some truth in this book it is based on an actual news story he had read, and it turns out he had edited the book when he found out from the actual Little Jewel that her mother was still alive. He always uses his hometown of Paris as the backdrop for this book. At the point where he started the book, I was reminded of the scene in Wim Wenders’s film until the end of the world where William Hurt’s character is seen by Solveig Donmartin’s character on a platform and follows him. Then I was reminded of what happens when a parent is reunited with a child in the film Secret and Lies. Those secrets and unanswered questions may sometimes be best left unsaid. Another Modiano trait is the lost person. This time, it is a mother, not a daughter. Then, how we remember the past is another trait of his works. Those fragments we remember are often real, but what happens when the past is blurred by the present. It is fair to say I loved this again. I think he is a writer I click with as a reader. He makes me want to wander aimlessly around Paris or sit in a cafe, watch everyone go past, and imagine them in a Modiano way. Do you have a writer you click with as a reader?

Winstons score – +A Another dive