The Rocks, Sydney |
The Black
Notebook written by Patrick
Modiano has been translated into English from French by Mark Polizzotti.
The story is about Jean, a writer
who discovers a set of notes that sets him on a journey through Paris in search
of a lost past. He tries to recall
Dannie , his former girlfriend from years ago, a mysterious woman with multiple pseudonyms and she seemed to
hang out with gangsters who lived in the Hotel Unic in rue du Montparnasse. Dannie had lived under the name of Mireille Sampierry and she could be involved with a possible homicide. When she disappeared, Jean was summoned by a certain Langlais who was conducting the investigation about the possible homicide. Jean retraces the
nocturnal footsteps he made decades
earlier. As he remembers it, he always felt on his guard in that neighbourhood,
could he possibly have left behind a double? He knows it wasn’t a dream. The
proof is that he still has this black notebook that contains names, telephone
numbers, appointments and short texts etc .
‘On one page of my black
notebook I had written : “Country house, With Dannie.” Nothing more.
“ Country house with Dannie.” I hadn’t recorded the name of
the village. Leafing through the black notebook, I experience two contradictory
feelings. If these pages are lacking in precise details, I tell myself it’s
because nothing surprised me back then
Youthful unconcern? But I read
certain phrases, certain names, certain indications, and it seems to me I was
sending out coded signals to the future. Yes, it’s as if I wanted to leave
clues, in black and white, that would help me clarify at some later date what
I’d been living through at the time without really understanding it. Signals
keyed blindly, in total confusion. And I’d have to wait years and years before
I could decipher them.'
He and Dannie went to a country house at La Barberie and he had left his manuscript in the
sitting room.
Today
, I’m no longer afraid of that notebook. It helps me to “scan my past”, and
that expression makes me smile. It was the title of a novel, A Man Scans His
Past, that I’d come across in the library of the house – several shelves of
books, next to one of the windows in the sitting room. The past? No, it ‘s not
about the past, but about episodes in a timeless, idealized life, which I wrest
page by page from my drab current existence to give it some light and shadow.
This afternoon, we are in the here and now, it’s raining, people and things are
plunged in grey, and I’m impatiently waiting for night when everything will
stand out more sharply, thanks to those same contrasts of shadow and light.
Arc de Tromphe |
I am learning French and it has taken me forever. I certainly hope to read Patrick Modiano's novels in French one day. Click
Jean's memory about Paris is akin to my memory about Sydney, a city where I used to spend my growing years in. Sydney is a young and modern city thus it does not have the grandeur and old charm that Paris has to offer but it is a city that means a lot to me.
Harbour Bridge, Sydney |
Sydney Opera House |
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