Grasses of the night

Grasses of the Night (Original title: L'Herbe des nuits ) is a novel by the French writer Patrick Modiano . It was published in 2012 by Éditions Gallimard and two years later the German translation by Elisabeth Edl was published by Carl Hanser Verlag .

content

The writer Jean remembers his fifty years earlier youth sixties in Paris district Montparnasse . Even back then, in his early twenties, he seemed to have fallen out of time, interested in old poets such as Rétif de La Bretonne and Tristan Corbière , as well as historical figures such as Marie-Anne Leroy, who was beheaded by the guillotine in 1794 , the Baroness Blanche and Jeanne Duval , Baudelaire's lover whom he would like to write a book about. He falls in love with Dannie, who is four years older than him, a young woman who seems to be surrounded by a mystery, goes in and out of strange apartments with great self-image and yet always seems rushed, as if she were constantly on the run. She introduces Jean to a group of men who frequent the Unic Hôtel on Rue du Montparnasse and who either come from Morocco or have ties to the country: the alleged student Aghamouri, Paul Chastagnier, Duwelz, Gérard Marciano and an older man, the all just call Georges, and who has a reputation for being dangerous.

Despite Aghamouri's ominous hints about Dannie's past life and a dead person in it, Jean spends a few happy months with Dannie. Then a Moroccan politician in exile is kidnapped in Paris, in which the group from the Unic Hôtel seems to be involved. Dannie also goes into hiding and Jean is interrogated by Inspector Langlais. He learns that Aghamouri was a member of the Moroccan security police, and he also learns that Dannie lives under a false name and is in turn wanted by the police. Since then, Jean, who has since become a well-known writer, has been tracking down his childhood love and using research, memory fragments and old entries in his black notebook to recompose the past that haunts him again and again into his dreams.

But only through a renewed contact with the now retired Commissioner Langlais, who gives him Dannie's closed files, does Jean learn the truth about his former lover, who was actually called Dominique Roger, but also lived as Mireille Sampierry or Michèle Aghamouri. She was already on record for minor offenses such as shoplifting when there was an argument at an evening party on Quai Henri IV one evening. Whether in self-defense or through an accident, Dannie shot a man with his pistol and has been on the run ever since. Jean recalls that Dannie once led him to the crime scene, driven by the desire to go back to the time before that fateful evening. He doesn't want to judge the woman he loved. And he regrets the shadows that have clouded the lightheartedness of that youthful love.

background

Like many of his novels, Grass of the Night is shaped by Patrick Modiano's own biography. The writer Jean is a barely veiled alter ego of Modiano. In his autobiography A Family Tree from 2005, Modiano reported a similar episode from his own perspective, using for the most part the same names as in the later novel. The parallels extend to the interrogation of the young Modiano by a commissioner of the Paris moral police named Langlais. In other novels, too, people of the same name appear, according to Duwelz in Ruinsblüten (1991). Modiano confirmed in a previous interview that “everyone I speak of was alive. I even push the accuracy so far as to call it by its real name ”. The kidnapping of the Moroccan politician in exile refers to the kidnapping and murder of Ben Barka in October 1965, an affair that has not yet been resolved and that reached into the circles of the French police and the secret service. The writer Jacques Audiberti , who died in 1965, made a brief appearance in the novel and wrote a poem entitled Dannie , the name of the main female character. The title Grasses of the Night comes from a poem by Ossip Mandelstam .

Publication and reception

Grasses of the night appeared in its German translation around a month after the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2014 to Patrick Modiano. Hanser Verlag had brought the publication, originally planned for spring 2015, forward to November 10, 2014. As a result, the novel was discussed in numerous German-language feature sections - without exception positively. In the December / January SWR best list , Grasses of the Night was voted third. Also in the sales bestseller list of book report , the Roman placed the highest ranked 11 on November 24, 2014.

For Gerrit Bartels, Grasses of the Night is “a good introduction to Modiano”. Jörg Aufenanger, on the other hand, the translator of Modiano's novel Ein so young Hund , recommends Grasses of the Night rather “for advanced Modiano readers, for the initiates”. Tilman Krause sees the Nobel Prize winner in the novel “at the height of his ability” and in a rather unusual “state of stylistic and thematic focus” for the author. At the end of the day, Sebastian Hammelehle even reads a detective novel that is "unusually straightforward for Modiano's standards". Joseph Hanimann makes it clear, however, that Grasses of the Night always remains “subtle and rich literature in the middle layers”, which places high demands on Elisabeth Edl's translation skills. Hans-Jost Weyandt draws the conclusion: "It has never been easier to find access to the work of a Nobel Prize winner, and rarely does sentimentally motivated prose achieve narrative clarity as in this novel."

Reading experiences

Reviewers discussed, among other things, what worked as a thriller for Grasses of the Night and what associations they had with previous art experiences while reading. Furthermore, the characteristic of Modiano's style has been described as a reading experience in itself.

Tilman Krause wrote in Die Welt : “With Modiano, French chansons always come to mind.” He found the reading to be like an excursion on which one encounters creatures who are bewitched and sway in the wind, but also shadows of political crimes: “ We got to know outlines of characters who will remind cinema fans of Truffaut's films ", they are" consecrated to night like by Novalis ". Joseph Hanimann reported in the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the confused memories looked like an underexposed black-and-white film by Georges Franju and Hans-Jost Weyandt in the taz had encountered "coat figures like from a Melville film" while reading Grass of the Night , as well as "a young woman out of a Piaf -Chanson."

Judith von Sternburg wrote in her review in the Frankfurter Rundschau that in Grasses of the Night there is an atmosphere of disquiet. The plot is constructed like in a thriller, with a murder case about which everything remains in the fog. But Modiano makes it possible for you to concentrate fully on the atmosphere while reading. This was largely due to Jean's passivity in his troubled but silent devotion to Dannie. Weyandt saw in Jean a nostalgic figure "who is condemned to indifferent observation" and said that Modiano was trying this figure in grasses of the night : people who "seem to disappear completely behind their observer masks." Weyandt discovered distance in the description in this novel and found the flowing “transitions from discretion to disinterest” in the figure of Jean to be problematic.

For Gerrit Bartels in Tagesspiegel , Modiano's style was what made reading it a pleasure. He thought that it was therefore not necessary to be able to decipher all the details. The prose floats gently in a tone that alternates between happiness and sadness, depending on whether it is a question of remembering or times that are past and therefore lost: “Whoever reads a novel by Patrick Modiano often has the same experience as many of his own Heroes: Time blurs, past and present merge, and whether this Modiano novel is from the seventies or a very recent one is quickly forgotten when reading it. "For Sebastian Hammelehle in the Spiegel it was" the typical one , the magical Modiano pull ”, into which Jean gets,“ and the reader with him. ”The reviewer gave a tip for this situation:“ When reading Grasses of the Night, it is best to have the map of Paris at hand. ” Jörg Aufenanger, the same year as Modiano, probably doesn't even need a city map, because, as he reports in his review in the Berliner Zeitung , he himself lived in Paris from the late sixties. He read the novel autobiographically in two ways: for Modiano and for himself, with sporty associations with the leaps in time that one tries to participate in in order to track down the past. Weyandt, however, described the text as so open that you could start reading somewhere in the middle, and: "It all seems light, almost magical, but at the same time it is transparent."

expenditure

• Patrick Modiano: L'Herbe des nuits . Editions Gallimard, Paris 2012, ISBN 978-2-07-013887-6 .
• Patrick Modiano: Grasses of the Night . Translated from the French by Elisabeth Edl . Hanser, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-446-24721-5 .
• Patrick Modiano: Grasses of the Night . Translated from the French by Elisabeth Edl . (Paperback) dtv , Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-423-14494-0 .
• Patrick Modiano: Grasses of the Night . Translated from the French by Elisabeth Edl . Read by Ulrich Matthes . 4 CDs , 2015, audio book Hamburg, ISBN 978-3-899-03940-5 .

Reviews

• Jörg Aufenanger : Book tips for autumn . In: Berliner Zeitung of November 14, 2014.
• Gerrit Bartels: I'll be old soon . In: Der Tagesspiegel from November 7, 2014.
• Sebastian Hammelehle: Paris in the sixties: the most powerful drug is to wait for a girl . In: Der Spiegel from November 12, 2014.
• Joseph Hanimann: Paris, how it flickers and swirls . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 9, 2014.
• Tilman Krause : In Paris, love only lasts three months . In: Die Welt from November 8, 2014.
• Judith von Sternburg: The time of disquiet . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of November 11, 2014.
• Hans-Jost Weyandt: Subtle feelings of guilt . In: the daily newspaper of November 8, 2014.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. fr: Jeanne Duval in the French Wikipedia .
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Jörg Aufenanger : Book tips for autumn . In: Berliner Zeitung of November 14, 2014.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Sebastian Hammelehle: Paris in the sixties: The strongest drug is to wait for a girl . In: Der Spiegel from November 12, 2014.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Gerrit Bartels: I'll be old soon . In: Der Tagesspiegel from November 7, 2014.
5. ↑ Andreas Platthaus : There is an obligation to remember . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 9, 2014.
6. ↑ The Nobel Prize works . In: Book report from October 31, 2014.
7. ↑ Review notes on grasses of the night at perlentaucher.de .
8. ↑ Patrick Modiano: Grasses of the Night . On the SWR best list , November 24, 2014.
9. ↑ Grasses of the Night ( Memento from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) at Buchreport .
10. ^ ^{A b} Tilman Krause : In Paris love only lasts a quarter of a year . In: Die Welt from November 8, 2014.
11. ↑ ^{a b} Joseph Hanimann: Paris, how it flickers and swirls . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of November 9, 2014.
12. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hans-Jost Weyandt: Subtile guilt feelings . In: the daily newspaper of November 8, 2014.
13. ^ Judith von Sternburg: The time of disquiet . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of November 11, 2014.