Every year in August I read a novel by Patrick Modiano. This summer it was the turn of ‘Sympathetic ink’, his last translated title (in Anagrama, in Catalan in Proa). Anyone who knows his work will say that Modiano is not a very summery author, but this time my reading has coincided with the two days of rain and the respite from the heat, and I have realized that perhaps in summer I find in its pages a premonition of autumn. Of its climate, of the return to the rhythms of the city. Because Modiano’s prose is often tinged with a particular melancholy, the one given off by silent sunsets in remote neighborhoods, abandoned gardens, on Sundays in August in the city, the loneliness of a security guard in a garage, the strangeness of an old coat…
In ‘Sympathetic Ink’, a man is looking for a girl who disappeared from one day to the next, without leaving a trace, based on a few clues. It is not a continuous search, but the investigation advances over the years, like a debt that cannot be removed from the head and is imposed as dictated by the games of memory and oblivion. It is not the best of Modiano’s book, but his voice is completely recognizable. The intrigue of the man who follows the trail of a woman is one of his recurrent themes —in ‘The grass of the nights’, in ‘Dora Bruder’— and at times he can seem like an author who always writes the same novel. In part it is so, but I prefer to see his books as different pieces of a large three-dimensional puzzle, whose set draws a space —a map of Paris— but also the passage of time.
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This family resemblance of all his books creates addiction, either because of the style or because of the environments, and when you finish one you want to chain readings and stay in that world. ‘Dark Shop Street’, ‘In the Cafe of Lost Youth’, ‘The Little Jewel’, ‘Sad Villa’, ‘A Pedigree’… The titles are already a warning. If we wanted to condense all the Modiano’s literary universe In two words, perhaps we should say: names and places. Paris is the place where most names and addresses get mixed up, but you would soon have to add streets and cafes, canals and quays, subways and garages, hairdressers, shops, houses. of childhood. Places to which the protagonists return to understand something.
‘Sympathetic Ink’ opens with a quote from Maurice Blanchot: “Whoever wants to remember must put himself in the hands of oblivion, of that risk that is absolute oblivion and of that beautiful coincidence that memory then becomes.” The weight of memory becomes a state of mind that is often projected from the emptiness of the past. In the end, the detective air that they take some of their stories is just the excuse to anchor in a time that keeps some decisive information. Yes, Modiano’s prose has that “notarial position & rdquor; that Josep Pla praised in Simenon, but at the same time he moves away from her to focus on what remains unexplained, invisible and ethereal like sympathetic ink, and that makes us understand that memories can be a trap.