Patrick Modiano

When the announcement came through about Patrick Modiano winning the Nobel Prize I promised myself that I would read some of his work as soon as possible.  Spurred on by finding that his works were quite short and were often about the occupation  I picked up Dora Bruder at Foyles. 

Reviews of his work for the Nobel compared Modiano to a modern Proust and I was not sure what this led me to expect.     What I found was almost an anti-novel which was as much about the writer as it was about Dora Bruder, a  young Jewish girl.   The narrator was moved to write the book when he found  Un avis de recherche for the girl in a wartime newspaper:

“PARIS

On cherche une jeune fille, Dora Bruder, 15 ans, 1m 55, visage ovale, yeux gris-marron, manteaux sport gris, pull-over bordeaux… »

The author undertakes a leisurely hunt for clues as to what had happened to Dora;   most of his discoverys come in the shape of finding out the address she was living at along with the dates.   He fills in the details about anti-jewish laws and actions carried out by the police on dates relevant to Dora’s current status and even goes so far as to evoke the weather at the time Dora might have been walking around or hiding in a particular area.  

The other side of the novel which permeates the narrative is the narrator tracking his relationship with his father over the period of the occupation;  the father seems to have behaved extremely badly towards his son and the emotional carnage which the narrator describes, parallels the much more shadowy, sketchy life of Dora.

The novel feels documentary-like in tone, a less emotional version of the TV programme “Who do you think you are?”.    The style very much underlines the message in that it alienates us almost completely from Dora and others in her position, rather as would have been the case at the time-“there’s an official programme of expulsions going on; let’s not ask too many questions-we’ve enough to worry about”.   As there are no memories, or virtually none, of the girl herself, we find it hard to really feel any sympathy except in a very distant kind of way.

The commentators who say that Modiano is concerned about memory preservation are right,  as even the places associated with Dora’s existence are fast disappearing so she is rapidly passing  from being a shadowy figure to one who never existed at all, to all intents and purposes.   There is no memorial, just a few entries with her name on some very inaccessible public records-except of course she now has a complete book about her.

Alevelfrench.com has covered several works relating to the second world war and the holocaust;  this novel would be approachable by sixth formers but probably doesn’t have the necessary level of emotional involvement to interest them as is the case with Un sac de billes or Un secret.