This is by Patrick Modiano. It was published in 1978, and won the Prix Goncourt the same year. There is an English version with the rather anodyne title of Missing Person. I read the French version, and have translated its title literally. We eventually learn that it's a line in an address. And a "Dark Shops Street" -- Via delle Botteghe Oscure -- still exists in Rome: "The street is named after a series of arches of ancient Roman buildings which were reused in medieval times for some small shops (It. bottega). They received light only from the entrance; for this reason they were called oscure (poorly lighted)." Via delle Botteghe Oscure borders the Jewish Ghetto on its northern side, and was the site of the erstwhile Italian Communist Party headquarters.


Here's the actual road...

We don't understand the significance of the title until we're well on through the pages, but it resonates with the sense of darkness, obscurity, elusiveness, and threat that permeates the novel. More specifically, the menace lurking in the background is Fascism, since the story, though set in 1965, probes the confused and murky days of the German occupation. When Modiano won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2014, the Swedish Academy singled out "the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation".

Memory and the occupation, or so I read, are recurring themes for Modiano. In his Nobel acceptance speech, he notes: "Being born in 1945, after the cities had been destroyed and entire populations had disappeared, must have made me, like others of my age, more sensitive to the themes of memory and oblivion."

He sees himself as "a child who owed his birth to the Paris of the occupation". This comes with its own problems: "Those who lived in that Paris wanted to forget it very quickly or at least only remember the day-to-day details, the ones which presented the illusion that everyday life was after all not so very different from the life they led in normal times. It was all a bad dream, with vague remorse for having been in some sense survivors. Later on, when their children asked them questions about that period and that Paris, their answers were evasive. Or else they remained silent as if they wanted to rub out those dark years from their memory and keep something hidden from us. But faced with the silence of our parents we worked it all out as if we had lived it ourselves."

Occupied Paris was a strange place, he continues. On the surface, life went on as it had always done. And yet things were anything but normal: "Adults and children could disappear without trace from one moment to the next, and even among friends, nothing was ever really spelled out and conversations were never frank because of the feeling of menace in the air."


A reminder of the era: Monument to the victims of Mauthausen concentration camp, Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, 2019

Our narrator is Guy Roland. But that's not his real name, and he doesn't know what his real name was, because he was struck with amnesia 10 years ago. He was named (and provided with the corresponding official papers) by the man who also became his employer, C.M. Hutte, head of a private investigation agency in Paris. But now that his boss is retiring, Guy wants to take the opportunity to try to unearth his own past.

So the book takes on the qualities of a detective novel, as various pieces of evidence -- tiny, disconnected bits of the past that end up stored in biscuit tins -- take him from person to person, and from place to place, often ending up down blind alleys, but sometimes triggering the stirrings of a recollection. Guy feels totally empty without his past. The book opens: "I am nothing. Nothing but a pale outline on the terrace of a cafe that evening."

Admittedly, amnesia plots are rather common, and according to Baxendale, generally misleading. But this novel is so beautifully atmospheric (it's melancholy and moody, with a dream-like ephemerality that slips between your fingers, yet roots itself in your mind), and so profound and thought-provoking, that you forgive it any implausibility.

I loved the shifting tableaux of people, which are depicted very filmically. I loved the very Parisian qualities. The fog, the darkness, the staircases of buildings -- it was Simenon and Maigret: "Another barge passed by, black, slow, as though abandoned." Guy says goodbye to his interlocutor: "And I was sure at that moment that he said something else, but the fog muffled the sound of his voice."

Following in Guy's footsteps, we visit piano bars ("Que reste-t-il de nos amours?, da da de daa, da da de daa..."), an abandoned country estate, cafe terraces, a photographer's flat overlooking the gardens of Sacre-Coeur...

Both the theme (the desperate attempt to locate and hold on to scraps of memories) and the objects (the pathetic little items that are all he has to work with) give the book a haunting quality. There's nothing quite so mournful as an old photo... Faces frozen in time, the colour leeched away, the faces of people you can't remember or never really knew... He and Hutte used to talk about the "beach man": The person who is in the corner of all the photos, yet no-one knows who he is, and no-one notices when he's gone. Hutte thinks we're all beach people: The sand retains our footprints for just a few seconds.

In the course of his quest, Guy often has the feeling that he is dreaming, as though he has already lived his life, and is now no more than a ghost floating in the warm air of a Paris evening.



But after a certain point, the memories -- if such they are -- start to come more thickly. They cluster round a woman called Denise, a model -- or was she a seamstress? One day, he has the feeling that the streets are the same as before, and yet he does not recognize them: "The buildings hadn't changed, nor yet the breadth of the pavements, but back then the light was different and something else floated in the air..."

That something else would be fear.

We have already heard about the Russian wave of emigration, and the problem of statelessness. Now there are increasing references to a feeling of insecurity. In fact, it is the memory of anxiety that first triggers Guy's more concrete recollections. Looking out of the window of a room in which he thinks he once slept, he registers disquiet and apprehension. He is sure that he had often stood there, at that hour of the day, not moving, just watching, not making the least movement, without even lighting a lamp. He remembers feeling anxious about going out, afraid that someone will notice him, stop him, ask for his papers. There are unexplained murders; identity checks become more frequent; people talk in hushed voices; there are references to instances of collaboration with the Germans. He remembers knowing all the places that have two exits. A man called Porfirio Rubirosa is providing people with Dominican diplomatic passports.

The story starts to circle more and more tightly around Denise, who disappeared while trying to cross the border into Switzerland in 1943. She was with a man called Pedro McEvoy. Guy thinks he is this man. And he is recognized as Pedro McEvoy by Andre Wildmer, a jockey, during an accidental meeting in a bar. Wildmer knows, however, that McEvoy was not Pedro's original name.

Throughout, we wonder whether Guy is actually getting closer to the truth, or building a chimera, or doing something that lies somewhere between the two: "I think we still hear in the entrance halls of buildings the echoing footsteps of those who habitually used to cross them, and have since disappeared. Something continues to vibrate after they have passed by, waves that become weaker and weaker, but are still detectable if we pay attention. If it comes down to it, I had perhaps never been this Pedro McEvoy, and I was nothing, but waves were passing through me, now far away, now stronger, and all those scattered echos that floated in the air crystallized, and there I was."

Was Guy in fact Pedro McEvoy? If so, he was originally Jimmy Pedro Stern. Greek by nationality, born in Salonica (isn't it curious how Thessalonica keeps emerging in what I'm reading at the moment?). Stern married Denise in 1939, but the records know nothing of him after 1940.



Guy cobbles together something of a story (or he thinks he does, as the veil of doubt is never entirely lifted...). He recalls going to Megeves with Denise and three others (the jockey Wildmer; an old friend called Freddie; and Freddie's girlfriend, Gay Orlow). Still feeling insecure even though they're tucked away in the mountains, he and Denise give in to the lures of some people-smugglers, who offer to take them over the border into Switzerland. After two hours of journeying, the party splits up. Denise is taken off by one of the men, never to be seen again. Pedro/Guy? is abandoned by the other smuggler, gets lost, collapses exhausted in the snow, but survives.

With his memories still fragmented and chaotic, Guy travels to Polynesia, where Freddie is now supposed to reside. Before he goes, he writes to Hutte: "Scraps, shreds have come to light as a result of my searches... But then that is perhaps what a life amounts to." Again he wonders, though: "Is it really my life I'm tracking down? Or someone else's into which I have somehow infiltrated myself?" On board the ship, he looks once more at the photos he has gathered, and feels they are losing their reality.

Freddie proves elusive. He must be hiding out somewhere, Guy thinks, assuring himself that he'll find him in the end.

And there is one last thing he wants to try. He knows Jimmy Pedro Stern once resided in Rome, at No 2, Via delle Botteghe Oscure. He will go there. So the book title takes on another layer of meaning, becoming the object in a quest that we are not confident will be completed, a last hope that we're inclined to think will not be fulfilled.

The novel ends with Guy taking another look at the photos he had wanted to show Freddie. One is of a little girl. She's crying. His mind whizzes from the Polynesian lagoon where he is standing to the seaside resort in southern Russia where this photo was taken. A little girl coming back from the beach with her mother, crying just because she didn't want the day to end: "She walks away. She has already turned the corner. And are our lives not just as quick to dissolve into the evening as this childhood sorrow?"



_*_*_

A couple of concluding issues:

-- Several times we slide off into a point of view that is not Guy's. The man who buys the jewellery that Pedro is selling to fund what he hopes will be their journey to safety; the woman in Valparaiso, whose godmother was called Denise; the former model, who has a friend called Denise, who lived with a South American called Pedro... I found this slightly odd. These are points of view that Guy could never have been aware of, could not possibly have remembered. The commentary here suggests that the different perspectives introduce the idea of a collective memory -- the memory of an epoch.

-- The novel is imbued with a sense of place. This critique puts it very nicely: "Modiano’s cities are memoryscapes... [His] work is interested in the way memories can arrive unexpectedly, and their connection to place. In the book, the narrator begins to walk the streets, attempting to retrace his steps and to piece together flashes of memory, like the traces of a dream on waking up: 'I was like a water-diviner watching for the slightest movement of his pendulum. At the top of each street I would stop, hoping that the trees, the buildings, would make me suddenly remember.'"

-- Modiano recalls in that acceptance speech: "[As a child] I was usually away from my parents, staying with friends about whom I knew nothing, in a succession of places and houses. At the time, nothing surprises a child and even bizarre situations seem perfectly natural. It was much later on that my childhood struck me as enigmatic and I tried to find out more about the various people my parents left me with and those places that kept on changing. But I was unable to identify most of the people nor to locate all the places and all the houses of the past with any topographical accuracy. This drive to resolve enigmas without really succeeding and to try to unravel a mystery gave me the desire to write, as if writing and the imagination could help me finally tie up all those loose ends." Which definitely explains the haunting, quest-like quality that characterizes Dark Shops Street (and, it seems, the rest of his oeuvre).



-- In that same speech, he refers to his fascination with the kinds of directories we see Guy consulting in the novel: "In my youth, to help me write, I tried to find the old Parisian telephone directories, especially the ones that listed names by street with building numbers. I had the feeling as I turned the pages that I was looking at an X ray of the city -- a submerged city like Atlantis -- and breathing in the scent of time... So it seems to me that the desire to write my first books came to me while I was looking at those old Parisian phone books. All I had to do was underline in pencil the name, address and telephone number of some unknown person and imagine what his or her life was like, among the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of names."

-- He wonders whether the instability of modern society is affecting the way we recall things: "Today, I get the sense that memory is much less sure of itself, engaged as it is in a constant struggle against amnesia and oblivion. This layer, this mass of oblivion that obscures everything, means we can only pick up fragments of the past, disconnected traces, fleeting and almost ungraspable human destinies. Yet it has to be the vocation of the novelist, when faced with this large blank page of oblivion, to make a few faded words visible again, like lost icebergs adrift on the surface of the ocean."

Which is an appropriately chilly way to sign off... Shadowy, mysterious, and atmospheric, this was a supremely evocative read, and I will definitely be revisiting Patrick Modiano.


Bergs in Iceland, 1989