Reading Group Review
September, in all walks of French life, generally means 'la rentrée', and, while it is certainly a long time since I left school, it is around this time of year that I begin to think of the reconvening of the Reading Group at the Institut français. This term (for want of a better word), there will be a series of meetings on the theme of 'Testing Translations', but, before that, to coincide with a short Patrick Modiano season, there was an additional edition of the Reading Group, only with no translation to test, on Modiano's as yet untranslated 'Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue'.
Prior to the Reading Group, I knew only one or two things about Modiano, specifically that he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014, and that a number of his significant works concern the period when France suffered under Nazi occupation. I had been meaning to read his work since the announcement of his Nobel Prize, so it was with some enthusiasm that I went to a favourite bookshop to pick up a copy of this text. The helpful assistant, to judge from her accent a native speaker of French, remarked as she placed my purchase into a plastic bag, 'It's one of his more difficult books. I wouldn't begin with this one, if I were you.' Gulp.
In the event, I needn't have worried. There is nothing too difficult about Modiano's French, and, reading the book, I found myself plunged into a kind of Paris of the imagination, one familiar from the photographs of Brassaï and Doisneau, or the cinema of the French New Wave. I felt like I was on home ground. Yet this is also a very real Paris, each event and character is located in an extremely accurate geography of the city, painted with precise strokes.
The plot, such as it is, concerns the interactions between Roland, a young aspirational man of letters, and a somewhat cold and distant habitué of the cafés of Montmartre and the Left Bank, known variously as Jacqueline and Louki. The difficulty upon which the bookseller commented, and a point I raised during the Reading Group, lies in the chronological vagueness of the narrative – while some markers in the text suggest a setting in the early 1960s, some of the other events could have taken place in the decades before this – the reader can never be sure what happens when.
A lot of the other themes of the book were unpacked during the gathering – those alert to the significance of names will spot a number of allusions to the Occupation, and it can also be read as a modern rewriting of Dante's 'Inferno'. Nevertheless, I think that the novel's difficulty was overstated to me. It's ultimately a highly enjoyable book – or as enjoyable as a book whose key themes are absence, suicide, the impossibility of knowing other people, and the sometimes unbridgeable gaps between us can be.