Suspended Sentences

Suspended Sentences (2014) by Patrick Modiano – Yale University Press – As New Condition

If you like your fiction clear, linear and reassuringly certain about who everybody is, where they are going and what exactly happened, Patrick Modiano may have other plans for your afternoon.

Suspended Sentences brings together three haunting novellas by Patrick Modiano, the French novelist and Nobel Prize winner whose speciality is memory: unreliable, half-lit, elusive memory, the sort that wanders into a room, forgets why it came in and then starts wondering whether the room itself ever really existed.

The volume contains Afterimage, Suspended Sentences and Flowers of Ruin, three interconnected works populated by disappearing adults, mysterious acquaintances, obscure addresses, abandoned places and people who seem permanently on the verge of becoming somebody else’s recollection. Modiano’s Paris is not so much a city as an enormous filing cabinet from which several important folders have gone missing.

Childhood, identity, wartime shadows and the difficulty of reconstructing the past run throughout the book. Characters attempt to piece together lives from names, photographs, buildings, scraps of information and memories whose reliability deteriorates the more closely they are examined. It is detective fiction in which the detective is memory, the evidence is incomplete and the chief suspect may have disappeared thirty years ago.

Much of Modiano’s fascination lies in what he does not explain. People appear, drift away and leave behind tantalising traces. Streets and neighbourhoods become loaded with significance. Apparently ordinary recollections acquire the strange atmosphere of dreams remembered just after waking, when everything seemed perfectly logical five seconds ago but is already beginning to dissolve.

Published by Yale University Press in 2014, this English-language edition introduced these three closely related works together in one volume, with translation by Mark Polizzotti. It is an elegant introduction to Modiano’s distinctive literary world and particularly apt for readers who enjoy novels by writers who regard providing all the answers as a regrettable form of oversharing.

The book is in As New condition, which means it has managed the unusual second-hand-book achievement of arriving at Crappy Old Books without apparently having participated very much in being old, crappy or even particularly used. An awkward situation for the brand, admittedly, but we shall persevere.

ISBN 9780300198058.

Ideal for admirers of literary fiction, French literature, atmospheric Parisian novels, explorations of memory and identity, Nobel Prize winners, or anybody who enjoys finishing a story with fewer certainties than they had when they began.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — occasionally forced, through no fault of our own, to sell a book in suspiciously excellent condition.

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