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<p>Patrick Modiano's literary production often revolves around the memory, the elusive kind. <em>"I am nothing"</em> is the first sentence in Missing Person (French: Rue des Boutiques Obscures) from 1978. In Modiano's world we consist of our memories, our history, the stories we construct about our lives. If we don't remember who we are, then are we at all?</p>
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<p>The protagonist Guy Rolland lost his memory 15 years ago in a mysterious accident. He was adopted by a private detective, Hutte, for whom he started to work. When Hutte retires and moves to Nice, Guy takes on the task to find out who he really is. Using photos, little clues, phone directories and conversations with a variety of people, he slowly pieces together his life, but it's a tortuous road with many holes. He gets one clue that leads to another; sometimes he thinks he's a person to only find evidence that he's another. Is he Pedro Stern or McEvoy? What is the name of the woman in the picture that he recognizes? Why did they escape Paris? More questions than answers pile up. Guy is groping in the dark, in a nearly cinematic and dreamlike world, populated by a variety of more or less strange characters. Based on the scant information, Guy begins to tell a story, but is that really what happened, or is he telling it to create his own history?</p>
<blockquote>"I believe that the entrance-halls of buildings still retain the echo of footsteps of those who used to cross them and who have since vanished. Something continues to vibrate after they have gone, fading waves, but which can still be picked up if one listens carefully. Perhaps, after all, I never was this Pedro McEvoy, I was nothing, but waves passed through me, sometimes faint, sometimes stronger,and all these scattered echoes afloat in the air crystallized and there I was."</blockquote>
<p>Can you avoid recognizing places where you once lived and persons that you once loved? Modiano's style at times feels quite Proustian in the way he deals with how the memory functions and the things that triggers the memory mechanism. Like Swann, Guy Roland is also also "in search of lost time." For the same reason the novel brings to mind the Alain Resnais movies that explore the relationship between consciousness, memory and imagination.</p>
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<p>Missing Person is a melancholic and eerie novel with a frame story that just as easily could have become a very conventional detective story. However, the fragmented narration and the reversed chronology make it anything but conventional. As usual, he writes with a divinely easy hand. I had to slow myself down to not risk losing all the little wonderful details in the language and environmental descriptions. Some chapters are a mere page and consist of lists of names, addresses and phone numbers, bringing to mind a novelist such as Georges Perec. But even these lists he manages to infuse with poetry. </p>
<p>In 2014 Modiano was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature <em>"for the art of memory with which he has evoked the most ungraspable human destinies and uncovered the life-world of the occupation."</em> And "the art of memory" is certainly an apt description. Modiano often deals with the treacherous nature of the memory and its shortcomings. For Modiano, both memory and identity are fluent and evasive, constantly changing. If memory and identity are subjects that interest you, and why wouldn't they, this novel is essential.</p>
<h2><img src="https://s11.postimg.org/78jrsh8yr/steem2.png" width="36" height="35"/> @SteemSwede</h2>
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