“For me, Paris is littered with ghosts.”

Back to Patrick Modiano for Sleep of Memory. In this novel, our narrator, now in his 70s, recalls people and events from his past. This is familiar Modiano territory with his fascination for disturbing shards of memory which emerge from the past. Sometimes these shards are cocooned in other memories–some blurred and impossible to fully retrieve while others form in a connect-the-dots way.

The book begins in a bookshop when a title, The Time of Encounters, catches the eye of the narrator. It’s one of those dizzying, goosebumps moments when the past suddenly emerges with the flash of memory. He recalls his relationships with a group of people saying “you never knew where some of those people might lead you. It was a slippery slope.”



Sleep of memory
The narrator recalls when, in the 60s, at age 20, he is acquainted with Martine Hayward, Geneviève Dalame, a secretary at Polydor Studios, and the older, mysterious, Madeleine Péraud. The latter, who is also known as “Doctor Péraud,” “belonged to a ‘group’—a secret society where they practiced ‘magic.’ ” The narrator visits Madeleine Péraud who quizzes him about his life and his acquaintances:

She asked good questions. the way an acupuncturist knows exactly where to place his needles.

The narrator is a “phantom student” enrolling in college to avoid military service in Algeria, and there are nebulous references to the narrator’s father and his knowledge of Black marketeers during WWII. So here are two quagmire moments in French history, and crime, which is a seminal feature in Modiano novels, is also present. The plot is fragmentary but Modiano’s brilliance at describing memory, as always, is impressive and evocative.

Sometimes I seem to recall the cafe was named the Bar Vert; at other times this memory fades, like words you’ve just heard in a dream that eludes you when you are awake.

I am always left wanting more with a Modiano novel, frustrated at the bare bones of the past which are occasionally illuminated by tantalizing memory, but I continue to be fascinated by his representation of memory: how memories submerge, are dormant and seem to disappear, yet certain memories seep back into our lives often unwanted. Modiano novels delve into pasts that can’t be quite fully remembered, pasts that aren’t fully understood–even decades later, and I can’t recall a writer who represents the elusiveness and vagaries of memory so well. Modiano scholars could spend a lifetime working through the mazes constructed in his books. How much is true? How much is fiction? Personally I prefer the languid nature, the dreaminess of his tales and don’t intend to become tangled in such details. I read this at night, before bed, and the book’s hypnotic feel was accentuated by the approach of sleep.

“No doubt, as the years pass, you end up shedding all the weights you dragged behind you, and all the regrets.”

Is that true?

Translated by Mark Polizzotti

Review copy

I have become fascinated by Patrick Modiano’s dream-like worlds. His continual exploration of narratives of lives shifting between the edges of polite society and the shady depths of the criminal underworld of Paris is mesmerising. That you feel you might be getting a glimpse into Modiano’s unconventional upbringing, the truth of which is no less strange than the characters in his fiction, adds to the intrigue and sense of mystery emerging from the pages.
But he also leaves you in a state of never being quite sure to what degree you are being misdirected. Without doubt Modiano’s work has generated great debate about how much of it might be memoir and how much pure flights of imagination. This adds a frisson to something which in itself is intriguing, because of the use of Paris as a location and the characters which inhabit Modiano’s stories.
Sleep of Memory is a story of misspent youth told by an older man looking back on his life. These are stories with a ring of truth and a flavour of how far reality has been stretched.
The writing has a particular dream-like quality which lulls the reader into a meditative state, but at the same time leaves them with the feeling that Modiano is playing with their expectations of how each of the set pieces will end.
None of the characters can be said to lead an average life, existing very much in the same dream world as the narrator. Yet there is also an element of the everyday and common place which Modiano transforms into something mysterious and just out of reach.
An experienced translator of Modiano’s work, Mark Polizzotti has crafted an uncomplicated text which allows the story to come through, enabling the reader to sit back and enjoy the, maybe, tall tale of Modiano’s unreliable narrator.
Sleep of Memory was courtesy of Yale University Press.

It is hard to describe this one. It was an amazing read and focused on the author's own experiences with having an advanced memory. Definitely recommend!

I've always had mixed feelings about Modiano - very love/hate. This is brooding and fragmentary, which is tolerable only because of its brevity.

Lots of glowing reviews around, but I simply didn’t see the point of this book. An old man looks back and reflects on the relationships he had with a motley collection of women in his younger days. It’s all very fragmentary and inconsequential and why these relationships are of any interest to anyone other than the author eluded me. It’s a narcissistic and self-referential book, a meandering meditation on memory, and I found it extremely tedious.

Melancholic and fragmentary, Modiano returns to Proust's obsession with memories and the past, and reworks it at the same time, reflecting contemporary concerns that left Proust himself, writing at the start of the C20th, untouched.

This novella is anything but slight, belying its sparse page count: each page is haunted ('for me, Paris was littered with ghosts') both stylistically and with emotive depth. Names and book titles litter the narrative, setting off connections that shimmer without becoming solidified. The image of lines of light, like on the Paris Metro maps, hold things together, illuminating pathways that appear then fade back into darkness.

On the surface, the narrator recalls key moments of his youth, between the ages of 17-22, built around women, not least a mysterious death. But this is just a proxy for a meditation on a life's essential fragmentation, however much we might seek to impose a linear and teleological narrative upon it.

In this sense, what Modiano is writing across his novels is quintessential 'romance' (the term used in its literary sense) where, like Odysseus, he's always travelling, always searching, and even when he reaches a temporary resting place, he leaves it again, perhaps, this time, forever. <i>Nostos</i> is the driver, but as a process and an aesthetic rather than as a desired and achievable final destination.

This is my first Modiano read, and I am proud to say I can't get enough of him. Not just because he is a Nobel winner and is supposed to be good, but because the way he presents his thoughts that leaves an everlasting impact on the reader.

In this book, he recalls incidents from him life pertaining to the women he was involved with in one way or the other. He jumps back-and-forth in time to link events and thoughts, drawing conclusions along the way. And those conclusive quotes are a must read, because they hold true when you apply them to your life now in the 21st century, making them easily relatable. Isn't that what defines a literary 'classic'?

And the way he describes Paris is just wonderful. I have been to the city once, and now I regret not having read him before my trip. I'd love to visit sometime again just to see the city from "Modiano's lens".

There is nothing that can go wrong if you choose to read this book. Plus, it's a short read, if you are looking for some quick motivation.

Needless to say, I look forward to reading his other works.

Thanks to the author and the publisher for the ARC.

Verdict: Highly recommended.

Patrick Modiano claims he is writing the same novel over and over again, and I for one can't get enough. This particular installment purports to have elements gleaned from his own experience, but given details, it isn't possible to separate fact from dream. The past forever present. Did they or didn't they, or was it all dream or imagination. Sliding between 1965 to 2017 to 1985. The narrative is slippery and elusive.

But no one presents Paris as well as he does with his encyclopedic familiarity of the streets, terrain and weather, the time of day, the extended night of winter, the memories that hover decades later in the air. He evokes people from the past imagining their life trajectories as connected lines illustrated by Metro maps that illuminate routes using different colors when buttons are pushed between stations. The smells and smokiness, mists and rainfall.

Ever since Modiano won the Nobel prize in 2014 I wanted to read one of his novels, hence I took the chance of reading this very short one.

If I were to describe it in one word that would be ‘melancholic’. His memoirs - more or less accurate - as a young man, between age of seventeen and around twenty, are built from bits and pieces, disparate recollections of mundane events, all related to the women who were part of his life back then.

Some young, some not so, single, married, mysterious or not, they all put their mark on the man he became. Nostalgic recollections, some pleasant, other not so much are described through the eyes of the old man who, from memory or notes, had restored events thought forgotten.

Those who enjoy an emotionless narrative and his dry writing will appreciate this little novel at its true value. However, I, for one, am not in that category.

Recommended for Modiano’s fans or those who enjoy the writing described above.

This book sounded very intriguing from the description. I wanted to enjoy it as I read along but I never was able to get on board. I couldn't tell if the author's memories were dreams or real. That may have been the point but I like something a bit more solid.