Patrick Modiano's fiction is intricately caught up in time, as he himself says. 'The great, the inevitable subject of the novel, is always . . . time.' And more interestingly, less portentously: 'I had the mania of looking back, always that feeling of something lost, not like paradise, but certainly lost.' In fact, time is less his subject than his medium, an indispensable structure. 'I was 18'; 'Eight years ago'; 'The evening when we first met'; 'It isn't as it was 18 years ago'; 'I met Francis Jansen when I was 19.' These phrases are taken almost at random from the opening pages of five different, recent novels, and they are entirely characteristic. Modiano's narrator registers lapses of time, situates himself at meticulously specified distances from a series of past moments: eighteen years ago, ten years after that, six years earlier than that. He is remembering whole patches of the past, but what he really can't forget is the barren present, the year on the current calendar. Time is not regained, it is segmented and catalogued, remembered as lost, the very precision of the memory a form of alienation.

LRB 30 November 2000 | PDF Download