Suspended Sentences

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A feeling of indirection pervades many of Patrick Modiano’s writings, and the three short novels in this volume are no exception. For all the specificity of detail — locations catalogued with loving precision, particular casts of light and shadow — one can’t escape a sense of haziness, as if everything were shrouded in gauze or viewed through a Vaselined lens. The narrative voice adds to this impression, the protagonists often placing themselves just to the side of the situation they’re describing. Like the prose in which they couch their stories, these narrators maintain a slight remove, as if full engagement with one’s surroundings carried the threat of great pain, or mortal danger.

Readers familiar with Louis Malle’s film Lacombe Lucien (1974), for which Modiano co-wrote the screenplay, will recognize this disengagement: it’s the same unconsciousness that lets the title character drift into the world of French fascism, as if by accident. In the novellas included here, a similar diffidence colors the author’s efforts in Afterimage to sort out his memories of the photographer Jansen, and the attempts by Patoche, the ten-year-old hero of Suspended Sentences, to penetrate the dubious adult world in which he and his brother live. Even the somewhat more skeptical protagonist of Flowers of Ruin is stymied by his inconclusive pursuit of the elusive Pacheco.

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