http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/31/patrick-modiano-interview-paris-nobel?CMP=share_btn_tw
Patrick Modiano: 'I became a prisoner of my memories of Paris':
The Nobel prizewinning writer on his new novel, the phantoms of his past and the destruction of the old quartiers
In his brief, enigmatic account of his first 21 years, Pedigree, Patrick Modiano describes how, in 1959, at the age of 14, when his mother was performing in a play at the Théâtre Fontaine, he began exploring the Pigalle district of Paris. "It was there, on Rue Fontaine, Place Blanche, Rue Frochot, that I first brushed against the mysteries of Paris and, without quite realising it, began dreaming of a life for myself." Aged 17, he wrote that he was only really happy when he was walking on his own in its streets. Since then, the detailed locations, street names and precise urban geography of the capital have been a feature of virtually everything he has written.
The haunting, melancholy atmosphere of the old working-class quartiers – their cafes, garages, run-down hotels and seedy nightclubs, the dreamlike labyrinth of boulevards, streets, squares, Métro stations – are combined in his novels with echoes of Modiano's broken and unhappy childhood. A curious cast of mysterious and frequently sinister characters appear and vanish from the narrative for no obvious reason. It is a Paris that recalls, at times, the mood of films such as Marcel Carné's Sous les Toits de Paris, and at others, the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of the Sartre or Juliette Gréco years.
I have long been addicted to walking the different quartiers of Paris, and still feel a flâneur's fascination for street names such as Rue Git-le-Coeur, Rue des Mauvais-Garçons and Rue Abbé-de-l'Epée; this, together with an abiding interest in what life in the city must have been like during and immediately after the occupation has made Modiano my ideal author. When the opportunity arose, therefore, to translate his most recent novel, So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, as well as his 2007 work, In the Café of Lost Youth, I jumped at the challenge. Recently, I was invited to meet him.
Modiano is now 70 and, one senses, an intensely private and reserved man. Tall, courteous and with a slightly apologetic manner, he uses extravagant hand gestures and is prone to be hesitant or inconclusive in his answers to questions, always searching for le mot juste, and employing ellipses (his favourite punctuation mark), as many of his characters do. In the book-lined study of his apartment near the Jardin du Luxembourg, where he lives with his wife, Dominique, I decided to focus on the topographical aspects of his novels. Was such specific naming of Paris streets and addresses, I wondered, in a world where fictional characters and events are so often mysterious and only dimly remembered, a way of creating atmosphere?
"I use them to try to obtain reference points. Buildings bring back memories and the more precise the setting the better it suits the imagination. As a child and a teenager I was very impressionable ... So forceful are these impressions that one becomes a prisoner of one's memories. There are images that pursue you all your life ... As a child, my family life was fairly unsettled and I was often left to my own devices. I began to wander through the streets of the city and would feel a mixture of fear and fascination as I forced myself to go further from home each time."
In his 2010 novel The Horizon, Modiano writes of his principal character, Bosmans, that "he never forgot the names of streets and the numbers of buildings. It was his private way of resisting the indifference and anonymity of large cities, and perhaps too the uncertainties of life."
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Funmi Tofowomo Okelola
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