So that you don't get lost in the neighborhood

So that you don't get lost in the quarter (original title: Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier ) is the 28th novel by Patrick Modiano , winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2014. The German translation by Elisabeth Edl was published in 2015. The book is available as “ Shadow of a doubt ”. In reading experiences it was described that the unspoken feels worse than facts, that the problematic from the past develops a mysterious musty smell and that Modiano's light-footed linguistic style can evoke a feeling of flowing or even flirting or being enchanted.

Title and motto

Parisian nightclub on the corner of Rue Puget and Rue Coustou in 2013

The main character of the novel is a writer, Jean Daragane. The words of the title, “Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier”, recur towards the end of the work on a piece of paper folded in quarters, as a handwritten phrase in the large, ancient hand of Annie Astrand, a woman who was her mother's age Daraganes. He later remembers walking around Paris alone as a boy with just this piece of paper in his pocket. Above all, the address of Annie and him at the time was written on this piece of paper. In the last part of the novel, events from the youth are formulated with further "pour que" ("with") constructions: "so that he (in the train station) does not lose himself in the crowd", "so that he does not lose his balance", " so that he would be able to remember his new name. ”On December 4th, 2012, after many years, Daragane returned to the area on Montmartre (p. 138) where he was walking around alone as a boy and where he was perhaps 22 years old at his first novel worked.

The motto “I cannot present the reality of facts, only their shadows ” is taken from Stendhal's autobiography , Life of Henry Brulard (1890).

content

Paris, Gare de Lyon (Lyon train station), 2012

Rue de L'Arcade, Paris, 8th arrondissement, 2014

In the life of the writer Jean Daragane, who had tried carefully for years to shield himself from everything, one day two young people, unknown to him, insisted on getting to know him personally. Gilles Ottolini and his mysterious companion Chantal Grippay pretend to have found his address book in the restaurant in Gare de Lyon , which leads him to meet them in a café on the corner of Rue de L'Arcade and Boulevard Haussmann . However, he is not particularly interested in the address book because he no longer uses the phone numbers in it. Almost against his will, Daragane becomes involved in an investigation that revolves around a certain Guy Torstel, who has drawn their attention to themselves. Ottolini wanted to write an article about this person. His name appears both in her files and in Daragane's address book, says Ottolini, and he wants to know whether Daragane knows this Torstel. But he doesn't remember. Chantal Grippay tries to get the writer to help her friend write, and to this end he secretly meets with him. Daragane suspects that it is only supposedly secret, and finds out that the company Chantal says Ottolini works for doesn't even exist. She tells Daragane that Ottolini has read all of his novels. Torstel's name is also mentioned in Daragane's first novel 45 years ago, Le noir de l'été . Daragane discovers that Chantal reminds him of a former friend of the same name. When he looks at the file created by Gilles after Chantal has left, a portrait of a child falls out, which appears to be a passport photo from a machine and can be seen on the Daragane, about seven years old. Otherwise, he still has documents in a suitcase that he has lost the key to. In the Gilles file, he circles Annie Astrand's name in red while reading, and afterwards, startled, he thinks about how to hide his mark from the two of them. In addition to his mother's and Annie's names, he also recognized the name Roger Vincent in the records.

View of the station building in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, April 2007

Daragane leaves the shelter that he had created for himself in a kind of "voluntary amnesia" ("une amnésie volontaire") and lets himself be carried away by the events like a feather in the wind. Other names quickly appear, other events and locations from the past. They mess up the present as well as the narrator's mind. There are many wrong tracks and it all takes place in three different times: in the writer's childhood, when he wrote his first novel, and when he was in his mid 60s. In addition, it is easy to get lost between the times and it is not easy to make out when and in what order Daragane meets certain people from his past, how old he is at that point in time and whether in a dream or not: Annie Astrand, Guy Torstel and the Doctor Louis Voustraat. In Saint-Leu-la-Forêt, the latter was the direct neighbor of an allegedly wicked group of adults with whom Daragane grew up at times, without his mother. During the conversation, Daragane remembers late night voices and laughter he heard half asleep from Annie and a Colette Laurent in the room across the hall. And that it was often a man's voice, with the man probably leaving the house before it was time for Daragane to go to school. Since Voustraat has the key to the abandoned house of a certain Roger Vincent, he wants to give the writer the opportunity to look at it. Daragane has the impression that Voustraat may suspect that his visitor is the boy from back then, but he prefers not to reveal himself to him and takes his move.

Chantal and Gilles, who are now referred to by Daragane by their first names, no longer call - even after he has plugged the phone back in - and they do not reappear as characters until the end of the novel.

At Èze-sur-Mer train station in 2006

House in Èze

The story ends with Daragane going to a place on the Côte d'Azur 20 years later , Èze-sur-Mer , whose small train station he thinks he recognizes. He had stopped there with Annie after a long train ride via Lyon when she was on her way to Rome, where she would not be found. He remembers how you feel when you wake up in the morning after a restless night with phone calls in the room next door to the sound of a driving away car and gradually become aware that there is nobody in the house more than you.

Narrative style and interpretation

In his review for the Tribune de Genève , Pascal Gavillet writes that the architecture of the novel is based on the fact that tracks are disturbed. It is unclear who is involved in the search game and with what. Everything is more complex than it seems at first glance. As the story progresses, the narrator's reflections mix so strongly with the research that they can no longer be distinguished from one another. The first sentence is without a subject: “Almost nothing”, which confidently expresses the will to abstraction. There is no "I" here, but nevertheless an omniscient narrator who discovers the puzzle pieces of a reality at the same time as the reader. Everything revolves around a point that lies outside of this fiction itself. The reader becomes incessantly confused and one does not know where this feeling of emptiness comes from when reading, not to say panic. The central figure is memory and its absence.

For Bruno Corti, on the other hand, in his review for Le Figaro , the threads come together with the character of Annie Astrand. Natalie Crom, in the debate at France Culture on October 3, 2014, is of the opinion that Annie Astrand is the central character of the book: an indefinable, complex mother figure, a phantom. And that although there is great clarity on the stylistic level, which is linguistically pure and aesthetically balanced. During the research, the main character clings to individual names and this is the most important. In the same conversation at France Culture, Laurent Nunez says that this is about doubles : Gilles and Jean, Chantal and Annie can be related to each other in pairs, there are name changes, forged IDs, incorrect addresses and, last but not least, what was written is no longer there (the first part of Daragane's first novel) and a kind of reconstruction is attempted.

Judging by the tenor of the questions that Modiano was asked about his latest novel in early October 2014 in an interview with the Gallimard publishing house , the story begins with a loss, not with something recovered. Loss and memory are related to each other: the more the narrator continues to track down his childhood, the less he understands. As if it were inevitable that remembering leads to more incomprehensibility instead of more clarity. The protagonist Jean Daragane struggles to write a coherent account of his own past, which raises the question of whether it is impossible to produce an autobiography. In addition to other memories, Daragane comes back to one of his youth novels, which, like a message in a bottle, should serve to find a certain woman again, a novel with a single reader, so to speak. It seems that the protagonist himself creates secrets from fairly everyday events. If you want to resolve such a secret, you will end up in inevitable disappointment.

Reading experience

In her review for Elle , Olivia de Lamberterie concludes that after reading this childhood denial, one feels that things that have not been spoken out or resolved may be worse than knowing that Annie Astrand is an acrobat who spent a certain time in prison and that Daragane was living with her in Montmartre when she slipped him the note with the address of her apartment. Francis Richard refers to the novel's Stendhal motto when he writes that it foreshadows how the two periods of Daragane's past would not fully emerge from the shadows, one a little over 60 years ago and the other fifteen years later. Modiano combined these two pasts with the present in a light-footed way, not without warning some zones in order to keep the reader awake with a feeling of mystery. With Modiano, nothing is as it seems (“l'apparence ne fait pas l'essence”) and the various narrative threads remain suspended. Therefore, one wants to lose oneself in it, as if the book was flirting with one, so the reading impression with Caroline Doudet. For Bruno Corty, experienced Modiano readers have the feeling of flowing and a strange atmosphere mixed with the musty smell of a problematic past after reading it. Corty predicts a sense of enchantment for new readers in the unparalleled universe of Patrick Modiano.

Well-known names

Well-known names come up in conversation between Daragane and Louis Voustraat Wanda Landowska and Olivier Larronde . Other characters are already known from the earlier novel Remise de peine (Eng. Penalty ) from 1988, where there was already a boy named Jean D., a surrogate mother Annie F. and a Roger Vincent. What distinguishes Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier from its predecessor is that similar events in a similar environment are examined from a different perspective: if it was the view from childhood at the time, it is now that of mature age.

expenditure

• Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier. roman . Gallimard, Paris 2014 ISBN 978-2-07-014693-2
  • So that you don't get lost in the neighborhood . Translated by Elisabeth Edl , Hanser, Munich 2015 ISBN 978-3-446-24908-0 , again dtv, 2017

Web links

• Interview with Patrick Modiano, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier de Patrick Modiano , gallimard.fr , October 2, 2014 (when the work is published), in French
• Alexandre Astier, Nathalie Crom (Télérama) and Laurent Nunez (Marianne) , Littérature: Rien que la vie et Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier , franceculture.fr , October 3, 2014, podcast, minutes 40-50 , in French language, debate on the latest Modiano novel and Liebes Leben , the last volume of short stories by Alice Munro , the 2013 Nobel Prize winner, which was published simultaneously in French on October 2, 2014.
• Pascal Gavillet, Prix ​​Nobel de littérature, Patrick Modiano explore l'oubli dans son dernier roman , tdg.ch , October 9, 2014, in French
• Olivia de Lamberterie, Le Roman de la semaine? “Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier” by Patrick Modiano , elle.fr , 10 October 2014, in French
• Bruno Corty, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier de Modiano: l'ombre d'un doute , lefigaro.fr , October 16, 2014, in French
• Francis Richard, “Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier” by Patrick Modiano , contrepoints.org , October 25, 2014, in French
• Caroline Doudet, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, de Patrick Modiano , leschroniquesculturelles.com , October 30, 2014, in French

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Bruno Corty, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier de Modiano: l'ombre d'un doute , lefigaro.fr , October 16, 2014, in French
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Francis Richard, “Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier” de Patrick Modiano , contrepoints.org , October 25, 2014
3. ↑ Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier. roman , Paris: Gallimard 2014, pp. 141, 142, 144.
4. ↑ In the original: "Je ne puis pas donner la réalité des faits, je n'en puis présenter que l'ombre ."
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} Olivia de Lamberterie, Le Roman de la semaine? “Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier” by Patrick Modiano , elle.fr , 10 October 2014
6. ↑ ^{a b c d} Pascal Gavillet, Prix ​​Nobel de littérature, Patrick Modiano explore l'oubli dans son dernier roman , tdg.ch , October 9, 2014
7. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Alexandre Astier in: Alexandre Astier, Nathalie Crom (Télérama) and Laurent Nunez (Marianne) , Littérature: Rien que la vie et Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier , franceculture.fr , October 3 2014
8. ↑ ^{a b c} Caroline Doudet, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier, de Patrick Modiano , leschroniquesculturelles.com , October 30, 2014
9. ↑ What Modiano answers in this interview can be found summarized in the entry on himself , in the section on Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier . Source: Interview with Patrick Modiano, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier de Patrick Modiano , gallimard.fr , October 2, 2014
10. ↑ page 113.
11. ↑ Christophe Bigot: Modiano écrit-il toujours le même livre? . In: L'Obs , December 5, 2014.
12. ↑ "à l'occasion de la parution"