Perhaps, in all Modiano’s novels, one main character is Paris. People come to it, they get to know each other and part ways, work at temporary jobs, rent penny rooms in hotels on the outskirts.
Three young «strangers» (less than twenty each) also roam the Parisian streets. They are still here — strangers, they are defenseless and lonely, like torn leaves, they don’t really know how they will live this day, and even more so the next one. Paris hugs them with stone arms and silently promises: “Nothing, girl. I still have a lot of cafes where you can serve eclairs … and streets where you can walk … Everything will work out somehow, girl. And the unconscious fear of who knows what gives way to an easy hope, in which the heroines are afraid to believe. The surprise with which you begin to read this novel is replaced by gratitude. For the fact that Modiano does not make a cult of his youth. Because he writes her anxious and insecure. For the fact that I was like that: you come for an order at a photo studio, they will tell you: “No!” — turn around and go resignedly. And then you will remember half a year as a burn, but you will not dare to demand (one heroine lives without an important photo for her). All three stories are without beginning or end and look like torn fragments of confessions. But I don’t remember anyone else writing so piercingly about youth, as about the slow torture of loneliness and the repetition of the anxieties of the day, about groping, about the time when any insignificant event etched into memory. A person changes his skin, walks all inside out, and it hurts from everything, even just from wind and water. Youth is like a terrible age when you don’t understand at all what to do with yourself, with your life. And so I am grateful to the author — for the pronunciation of this topic.
Translation from French by Irina Volevich.
Alphabet, 160 p.