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ilse 's review for:
So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighborhood
by Euan Cameron, Patrick Modiano
The wise man makes his own heaven while the foolish man creates his own hell here and hereafter. Could one create one’s own Paris?
When I was young I used to visit Paris twice a year, fatally in love with the city, and with my beloved. Driving at night to Paris, smoking, listening to Beethoven, John Cale and Cocteau Twins, I still just couldn’t believe that he had set eyes on a bookwormish house sparrow like me, abducting me to Paris the first week we were together, skipping all courses we had to attend. Paris enraptured me even more in winter time, in the snow and mist, stone-cold. I remember our childishly sneaking into the musée d’Orsay by entering a staff door in the basement, or pretending we were art students to get free access to the musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou. I felt like G.F. Handel’s Semele before burning to death:
For hours we roamed the streets, willingly getting lost, dazed by the city’s splendour, imbibing its beauty in the daytime, somewhat silenced by its unrivalled ambience at night. An atmosphere beyond description to me, but magnificently evoked by Patrick Modiano’s transporting prose. Like some of his other novels I read (apart from [b:La Place de l’Étoile|323535|La Place de l’Étoile|Patrick Modiano|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472890343s/323535.jpg|314240]) So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood is once more a brilliantly styled, melancholic dance to the music of memory, on ’memories drifting away like bubbles of soap or fragments of a dream that vanished on waking’.
Modiano composes a minimalist soundtrack of recurrent themes, leitmotifs, endless variations on melancholic, dreamlike tunes, entrancing all too susceptible souls who dare to enter his uncanny universe.
How could I possibly not get carried away by Modiano’s Paris and by his mesmerizing music? Even if he apparently writes the same novel over and over at first sight, each time he seems to come across a different approach to reconsider and rewrite his murky past by means of enigmatic characters and likewise mysterious events.
To be haunted by fading, harrowing, aching memories, real and imagined, one tries simultaneously to run from and desperately needs to cling to, pointless ramblings through obscure, deserted streets in search of lost time and mysteries to be solved, evading certain places and people, all the self-deceptive strategies to cope with the hurting - the opaque stardust his novels are made of. The fragility of memory. The self-imposed isolation. All that and (rather atypical for Modiano) a heartrending finale, made this one of the most poignant and melancholic books I read of him so far.
We’ll always have Paris.
Last time I visited Paris, half of a lifetime later, a promenade to the Panthéon and the Jardin de Luxembourg involuntarily ended up in the Rue Saint-Jacques, finding the old fleabag hotel where we stayed so many times gone, gone like my late beloved, leaving only behind unreliable memories, evaporating the moment I try to catch them in my paltry words, reminding me of Tamina in Kundera’s [b:The Book of Laughter and Forgetting|240976|The Book of Laughter and Forgetting|Milan Kundera|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1446568718s/240976.jpg|3428728], falling into despair because the past was becoming more and more faint and his image irrevocably slipping away.
But all this past had become so translucent with time....a mist that dissipated in the sunlight.
(In loving memory of Koen B. (January 24, 1969- December 8, 1997))
(Photographs by André Kertész)
When I was young I used to visit Paris twice a year, fatally in love with the city, and with my beloved. Driving at night to Paris, smoking, listening to Beethoven, John Cale and Cocteau Twins, I still just couldn’t believe that he had set eyes on a bookwormish house sparrow like me, abducting me to Paris the first week we were together, skipping all courses we had to attend. Paris enraptured me even more in winter time, in the snow and mist, stone-cold. I remember our childishly sneaking into the musée d’Orsay by entering a staff door in the basement, or pretending we were art students to get free access to the musée national d’art moderne at the Centre Pompidou. I felt like G.F. Handel’s Semele before burning to death:
Endless pleasure, endless love,
Semele enjoys above!
On her bosom Jove reclining,
Useless now his thunder lies;
To her arms his bolts resigning,
And his lightning to her eyes.
For hours we roamed the streets, willingly getting lost, dazed by the city’s splendour, imbibing its beauty in the daytime, somewhat silenced by its unrivalled ambience at night. An atmosphere beyond description to me, but magnificently evoked by Patrick Modiano’s transporting prose. Like some of his other novels I read (apart from [b:La Place de l’Étoile|323535|La Place de l’Étoile|Patrick Modiano|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1472890343s/323535.jpg|314240]) So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood is once more a brilliantly styled, melancholic dance to the music of memory, on ’memories drifting away like bubbles of soap or fragments of a dream that vanished on waking’.
Modiano composes a minimalist soundtrack of recurrent themes, leitmotifs, endless variations on melancholic, dreamlike tunes, entrancing all too susceptible souls who dare to enter his uncanny universe.
How could I possibly not get carried away by Modiano’s Paris and by his mesmerizing music? Even if he apparently writes the same novel over and over at first sight, each time he seems to come across a different approach to reconsider and rewrite his murky past by means of enigmatic characters and likewise mysterious events.
To be haunted by fading, harrowing, aching memories, real and imagined, one tries simultaneously to run from and desperately needs to cling to, pointless ramblings through obscure, deserted streets in search of lost time and mysteries to be solved, evading certain places and people, all the self-deceptive strategies to cope with the hurting - the opaque stardust his novels are made of. The fragility of memory. The self-imposed isolation. All that and (rather atypical for Modiano) a heartrending finale, made this one of the most poignant and melancholic books I read of him so far.
These words had travelled a long way. An insect bite, very slight to begin with, and it causes you an increasingly sharp pain, and very soon a feeling of being torn apart. The present and past merge together, and that seems quite natural because they were only separated by a cellophane partition. An insect bite was all it took to pierce the cellophane.
We’ll always have Paris.
Last time I visited Paris, half of a lifetime later, a promenade to the Panthéon and the Jardin de Luxembourg involuntarily ended up in the Rue Saint-Jacques, finding the old fleabag hotel where we stayed so many times gone, gone like my late beloved, leaving only behind unreliable memories, evaporating the moment I try to catch them in my paltry words, reminding me of Tamina in Kundera’s [b:The Book of Laughter and Forgetting|240976|The Book of Laughter and Forgetting|Milan Kundera|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1446568718s/240976.jpg|3428728], falling into despair because the past was becoming more and more faint and his image irrevocably slipping away.
But all this past had become so translucent with time....a mist that dissipated in the sunlight.
(In loving memory of Koen B. (January 24, 1969- December 8, 1997))
(Photographs by André Kertész)