Patrick Modiano's novelty is not attractive to read.
Novel
Patrick Modiano: The Chevreuse Years (Chevreuse). Finland Lotta Toivanen. WSOY. 170 pp.
French Patrick Modiano (b. 1945) has published more than 40 books since 1968, mostly short novels.
It has been said about Modiano that he writes the same work over and over again. They usually deal with the tension between memory and forgetting. The older author character looks melancholic at the lost youth and childhood. France occupied by Germany during the war serves as one source of inspiration.
So that you don't get lost at these corners -the Appraiser of the novel Hannu Marttila described the main character's relationship with his past as follows: it has turned into a “translucent, sun-evaporating mist gauze” (HS 24.6. 2015).
Fresh The Chevreuse years is Modiano's ninth work translated into Finnish. The protagonist's look back is characterized as follows: “From a distance, the events seemed simultaneous and blended like double-exposed photographs.”
This is how the same is varied.
The Chevreuse years begins with the sentence: “Bosmans remembered that a certain name, Chevreuse, had been repeated in the conversations.”
Seventy-year-old writer Jean Bosmans returns in his mind 50 years ago to the 1960s in the company of two mysterious women. The trio is in the Chevreuse area near Paris. They are interested in the large apartment where Bosmans lived as a child during the war.
A strange network gathered in the same place. What was that? How do women get involved? Did Bosmans witness anything illegal in the apartment as a child? He starts to figure out what it's all about.
Remembering joins places on Modiano often. It can also be a crime scene. of the French original, Chevreuse2021) title of the English version Scene of the Crime describes well the central idea of the book: the main character wants to clarify his childhood and solve a possible crime.
“How do you organize all the signals and morse code messages from more than fifty years ago and find their common thread?” The signals form a chain with addresses, phone numbers and people's names. The parts of the chain will change as the investigation progresses.
Meaningful and meaningless things get mixed up. If the memories are fake memories.
It's in the book eerie atmosphere. The ghosts of the past are not humanized at any point. It is said about Bosmans that “he had been living in the narrow border zone between reality and dream for years”. The chain of flashbacks—an old man reminiscing about a young man reminiscing about his childhood—is unreliable because the passage of time obscures things.
The work's noir-inspired detective story is complicated. A huge number of characters come and go in different time planes, but why?
It's pointless to expect an opening ending from Modiano either. Solving the mystery can be a blur. Making fiction becomes central: Bosmans is a writer who builds a story about his past that can become a novel.
The problem of novelty is that it doesn't attract interest with its crazy patterns, characters or levels.
The 2014 Nobel Prize-winning author is praised for his hypnotic and enchanting style, but now everything just seems boring. What was meant to be fascinatingly hazy falls flat. Melancholy loss is not felt.
Modiano is compared to two great memoirists, to Marcel Proust and to W. G. Sebaldbut we stay far away from them. The Chevreuse years is like Modiano's past: Gaussian and easily forgotten.
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