Fans of Maurice Chevalier won’t be pleased, but Modiano’s admirers will find this early work fascinating.
“I know the life stories of these shadows is of no great interest to anyone, but if I didn’t write it down, no one else would do it”: three early novels by Nobel Prize–winning French author Modiano (Suspended Sentences, 2014, etc.) that look back to the years of the Nazi occupation.
In terms of storytelling, the first novel in the trilogy, La Place de l’Étoile (originally published in 1968)—the title refers to both the Parisian plaza and the requirement that Jews wear stars of David as identification—is the least conventional. It begins in the middle of things: “This was back when I was frittering away my Venezuelan inheritance.” Who is “I,” and what is this Venezuelan treasure? Working backward into the story, Modiano recounts the histories, invented and real, of an alter ego named Raphäel Schlemilovitch, who, in various guises, is revealed to be a Jew who has nothing but admiration for the German occupiers of France: “My God, how handsome were the youths on the far side of the Rhine!” The homoerotic yearning is widely shared: as the story moves along, Schlemilovitch becomes less and less attractive, even as his collaboration is shown to be commonplace. Yet it's also subtle; the presence of the Germans encourages all sorts of bad behavior, including the pornographic impulses of an aristocrat who wishes no less than “to prostitute French literature in its entirety.” It’s a strange adventure, reminiscent at times of the Céline of Castle to Castle. In the second novella, The Night Watch (1969), announcing a favorite theme, Modiano works a puzzle of unfixed identities, its narrator a double agent of whose sympathies we can never quite be sure. “I hereby authorize my biographer to refer to me simply as 'a man,' and wish him luck,” Modiano writes, meaningfully. The third, Ring Roads (1972), extends that puzzle across generations as it depicts more or less ordinary people simply trying to survive.
Fans of Maurice Chevalier won’t be pleased, but Modiano’s admirers will find this early work fascinating.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-372-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
An elegant, understated book about a simple man still leaves something wanting.
In this quiet, serenely powerful novel, a man lives out his life in a remote mountain village as the bulk of the 20th century sweeps past.
Andreas Egger is a small boy, an orphan, when he's brought by horse cart to a small village in the mountains. It's 1902. The farmer who takes him in also beats him, and Andreas leaves when he turns 18. Then he goes about scraping together a living. Left with a bad limp—a vestige of a particularly bad beating—Andreas still wrests his living from the earth through hard physical labor. Decades pass. What else happens? It’s hard to say. This slim novel relies less on the engine of a plot than on the lyricism of its own poetry. Andreas does fall in love, marry, and lose his wife to a devastating avalanche that wrecks their home. The snow sweeps Andreas along in its flow. Similarly, Andreas is swept along by the major moments of the 20th century. Modernity arrives in the form of the cable cars that Andreas helps to erect on the side of the mountain. Later, television and tourists arrive, too, as Andreas looks on. Before that, though, there is the second world war to contend with. Andreas spends two months as a soldier and eight years as a prisoner of war in Russia. But this experience takes up little more than 10 pages, and then Andreas returns home. The novel seems to skim through all of these struggles, small and large, personal and historical. Seethaler, a Vienna-born writer and actor, writes with quiet serenity, elegance, and grace. But there's something almost too smooth about all of this. Lyrical as the work is, in the end it is also somehow slippery and ungraspable. Andreas is born, lives his life, and dies. So do we all. But there must be something more to say about it.
An elegant, understated book about a simple man still leaves something wanting.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-28986-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A strong, absorbing Chilean family chronicle, plushly upholstered—with mystical undercurrents (psychic phenomena) and a measure of leftward political commitment. (The author is a cousin of ex-Pres. Salvador Allende, an ill-fated socialist.) The Truebas are estate-owners of independent wealth, of whom only one—the eventual patriarch, Esteban—fully plays his class role. Headstrong and conservative, Esteban is a piggish youth, mistreating his peons and casually raping his girl servants . . . until he falls under the spell of young Clara DelValle: mute for nine years after witnessing the gruesome autopsy of her equally delicate sister, Clara is capable of telekinesis and soothsaying; she's a pure creature of the upper realms who has somehow dropped into crude daily life. So, with opposites attracting, the marriage of Esteban and Clara is inevitable—as is the succession of Clara-influenced children and grandchildren. Daughter Blanca ignores Class barriers to fall in love with—and bear a child by—the foreman's son, who will later become a famous leftwing troubadour (on the model of Victor Jara). Twin boys Jaime and Nicholas head off in different directions—one growing up to become a committed physician, the other a mystic/entrepreneur. And Alba, the last clairvoyant female of the lineage, will end the novel in a concentration camp of the Pinochet regime. Allende handles the theosophical elements here matter-of-factly: the paranormal powers of the Trueba women have to be taken more or less on faith. (Veteran readers of Latin American fiction have come to expect mysticism as part of the territory.) And the political sweep sometimes seems excessively insistent or obtrusive: even old Esteban recants from his reactionary ways at the end, when they seem to destroy his family. ("Thus the months went by, and it became clear to everyone, even Senator Trueba, that the military had seized power to keep it for themselves and not hand the country over to the politicians of the right who made the coup possible.") But there's a comfortable, appealing professionalism to Allende's narration, slowly turning the years through the Truebas' passions and secrets and fidelities. She doesn't rush; the characters are clear and sharp; there's style here but nothing self-conscious or pretentious. So, even if this saga isn't really much deeper than the Belva Plain variety, it's uncommonly satisfying—with sturdy, old-fashioned storytelling and a fine array of exotic, historical shadings.
Pub Date: May 23, 1985
ISBN: 0553383809
Page Count: -
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1985
BOOK TO SCREEN
APPRECIATIONS
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