THE BLACK NOTEBOOK (2012/2016)
Patrick Modiano
Mariner Press, 144
pages. Published in French. Translated by Mark Polizzotti.
* * * *
And yet, it was no dream.
Sometimes I catch myself saying those words in the street, as if hearing
someone else's voice. A toneless voice. Names come back to me, certain faces,
certain details. No one left to talk with about it. One or two witnesses must still
be alive. But they've probably forgotten the whole thing. And in the end, I
wonder if there really were any witnesses.
Of all human traits, few are as marvelous or as unreliable
as memory. To appreciate Patrick Modiano's The
Black Notebook try this: find the box where you've squirreled away things
you don't have the heart to toss. Find a notebook from a class you only vaguely
recall taking and try to reconstruct the content based solely upon the notes
you took. Now imagine you've not looked at those notes for fifty years. Do you
recognize yourself in those notes, or is it "as if hearing someone else's
voice?"
There are many books one reads because they are great
stories, even if the prose is so-so; The
Black Notebook is the opposite. It deals with the efforts of an aspirant
writer straining to gaze at his own past through a gauzy curtain. He recalls
his infatuation with–perhaps even love for–an intoxicating woman named
"Dannie," if that was even her actual name. All he has to assist him
as he sifts through a half-century's worth of memories is the namesake black
notebook he kept. It's not a diary–more like a college notebook in which one
furiously scribbles detail that might or might not be germane. Who, after all,
knows what's important when one is lost in the moment? Our narrator, Jean,
finds names and recalls faces–Paul, Aghamouri, Dulwelz, Gerárd–but who were
these people, really? What do we know of those with whom we passed the time
when we were in our student years? And who was "Georges?" Why can't he remember him at all? Why was the 30-year-old married Aghamouri never seen with his wife,
and why was he always hanging out in the Montparnasse (Left Bank) student
quarters of Paris?
Let's add another complicating factor: the Algerian crisis.
You need know nothing more than this: the deep roots of the 2015 terrorist
attacks in Paris lay in a 1954-62 war in which Algeria threw off French
colonial rule, and left behind a large Muslim immigrant population that was
neither fully French nor fully Algerian. (And left in Algeria were the pieds-noirs, French Catholics and
Sephardic Jews.) Paris was akin to Saigon during the Vietnam War–a den of
plotters, recruiters, and propagandists supporting either the insurgents or
spying on them. What would a not-yet-twenty Jean understand of such intrigue?
Looking back, it's likely that the crowd romantically dubbed the "Unic
Hotel gang" might have contained unsavory, even dangerous people but, as
Modiano writes, "No one is left to talk about it." Was Dannie among
them? Jean's notebooks hint of her dark secret, but what was it? Did she love
him, or was Jean just a pawn in a bigger game–a naïve pasty blinded by romance
and an inflated sense of his own cleverness?
Modiano is a major writer, the winner of numerous awards
including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for literature. You should not read The Black Notebook for the story, but
for its poetic prose and for what it teaches you about memory. It is sometimes
called a stream of consciousness novel, but that's not quite right; it's more
about how that stream disappears underground and meanders in ways unknown and
unknowable. To risk a different analogy, The
Black Notebook is a thousand-piece puzzle in which only about a third of
the cutouts remain. The tone is dreamy and the action in interior–within Jean's
mind. Literary critics label it "metafiction," but I prefer the term
"intoxicating."
Rob Weir
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