December 23, 2015

After the Circus - Patrick Modiano


Yale University Press, October 27, 2015.



 

Four Stars


 

After the Circus was originally published in French in 1992, and is now being published in English translation, following the author’s Nobel Prize win in 2014. I was looking forward to finally reading Modiano’s work, and I have to say, it was pretty much what I expected. It has a very European noir feel to it, with themes of nostalgia and memory repeating throughout the story. The characters are well-drawn, although the main character could easily be the city of Paris – Jean and Gisele seem to be wandering through living, labyrinthine streets that move and shift behind them.

 

 The atmosphere of the novel is surreal, like being in a dream. Even though nothing unrealistic is happening, it just feels very detached and emotionally distant. I kind of lost the thread of Jean’s backstory halfway through, although I don’t know if it was just me, or if the plot really did become more abstract. Either way, it didn’t take away from the feeling of reading this book, which was made even more dreamlike by the lost sense of reality.

 

Jean meets Gisele after they have been separately interrogated by the police. Immediately, Jean is attracted to Gisele in an almost obsessive manner. He is afraid that Gisele will disappear, so he contrives to meet with her again, or to have her leave a mysterious suitcase at his apartment, for which she will have to return. The minor characters that interfere with Jean’s obsession seem to disassemble in front of him, causing the reader to wonder if they ever existed at all. Jean wants to erase his past, and as he tells us of one man, “[h]e was receding in time. He would go join all the other bit players, all the poor accessories of a period in my life.” (Loc. 1107)

 

Because Jean is so consumed by the idea that Gisele will disappear, her loss becomes inevitable. The scene is darkly atmospheric, and we cannot know if the threats to their relationship are real, or if they are evoked by the fears and expectations of the narrator. As Jean wanders through the city, there are more questions than answers, and we never really find out the truth about the others. Jean disassociates from himself, and he says, “[t]he more I walked, the more it felt as if I was in a foreign city and becoming someone else.” (Loc. 1198)

 

The novel is set in the 1960s, when Paris was still rebuilding itself after WWII. The changes to the city allow both Gisele and Jean to vanish into its uncertainties. The whole plot (or lack thereof) feels like a metaphor for this lost generation after the war, filled with chance encounters and the search for depth of feeling, desperate for love. There are many unknowns, and an abrupt ending in which nothing is resolved. After this experience, I feel like reading Modiano is definitely more about the journey than any destination. I look forward to reading more by him, as I think his recurring themes will add new layers to his body of work as a whole.

 

 

I received this novel from Netgalley and Yale University Press in exchange for an honest review.

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