“IN 2014, FRENCH AUTHOR Patrick Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature “for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation.””
“Generally Modiano writes short, easy-to-read novels (most are around 200 pages long, some shorter) with big themes: memory, loss, identity, seeking. They are easily approachable and satisfying to read. Despite this, he is still not widely read in the United States.”
“his novels are infused with the tragic sense of life, as defined by the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who named this state of existence: the sense of tragedy that comes from our being self-conscious creatures who, through the act of living, are brought face to face with our frailty and our limitations, the chief one of which is our mortality”
“Memory occupies an odd place in consciousness, somewhere between reality and dream. This intersection is an area of interest for Modiano, and he is acutely aware of the intermittent interpenetration of these different states of consciousness and how, for example, “the contagion of dreams into reality” affects our existence.”
“Other writers have devoted their art to capturing memories, notably Proust, to whom Modiano is often compared. In Proust, however, memories arise from sensations or sensorial impressions, and in Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel, the narrator of the novel, does not question the verisimilitude or reality of his memories. His concern is whether a memory will “ultimately reach the clear surface of my consciousness, this memory, this old dead moment.””
“Modiano is not concerned with bringing what he calls a “dead moment” to consciousness, nor with the structure of memory or how it functions, as Proust was. A narrator in a Modiano novel either has a memory of an event: “I remember a car ride, five years later, from Pigalle to the Champs-Elysées”; or, he has no memory of an event.”
“Abandonment, people disappearing, with or without cause, is something that Modiano recognizes but doesn’t want to believe in: “I refused to accept that people and things could disappear without a trace,” he has the narrator say in Afterimage, a sentiment echoed by many of his other protagonists. But in novel after novel, people do simply disappear, and not only do they disappear, but, as the concierge in Honeymoon tells the narrator, they “don’t come back any more. Haven’t you noticed that, Monsieur?” In other words, they vanish.”
“The tragedy is that memories are mortal; they degrade over time and disappear, abandoning us just like people. And Modiano suggests that loss, abandonment, and the threat of vanishing is the fate that we all suffer, that every day we, too, are abandoned. Loved ones pass away, children leave home, our significant other leaves us, or we leave them, our memory fails us, our friends unfriend us. His stories, told without sentimentality or emotion (the lack of which some readers find unnerving), portray the struggle in which we are all engaged as we work to keep our lives in balance in the face of these ongoing losses.”
“[2] Proust’s investigation into the nature of memory and time brings him to this conclusion which is I think, worth quoting at length for it sheds light on his technique, and the differences between him and Modiano — as well as for its sheer beauty: But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection […] Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, has tried to follow it into my conscious mind.”