Patrick Modiano: Suspended Sentences

He was seeking a lost innocence and settings made for enjoyment and ease, but where one could never be happy again.


Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.


On the sidewalk, dead leaves. Or burned pages from an old Gaffiot dictionary. It’s the neighborhood of colleges and convents.


Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel
Like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon
Like a carousel that's turning running rings around the moon
Like a clock whose hands are sweeping past the minutes of its face
And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space
Like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind.
-Alan and Marilyn Bergman, 1968


I reached Rue d'Ulm. It was deserted. Though I kept telling myself that there was nothing unusual about that on a Sunday evening in this studious provincial neighborhood, I wondered whether I was still in Paris. In front of me, the dome of the Pantheon It frightened me to be there alone, at the foot of that funereal monument in the moonlight and I veered off into Rue Lhomond.


At that moment a phenomenon occurred for which I'm still trying to find an explanation.... Little by little, that man melted into the wall. Or else the rain... falling on him so heavily, had dissolved him....He had vanished in that sudden way that I'd later notice in other people...which leaves you so puzzled...you have no choice but to look for proofs and clues to convince yourself these people had really existed.