Out of the Dark

Of Modiano's works, "Out of the Dark" is one the most straightforward in structure: boy meets girl, boy wins girl, girl leaves boy, boy finds girl many years later. (Spoiler alert) The characters in this novel (as in many Modiano novels) are mainly young people, in their early twenties. They are separated from their parents, cut off from history by either necessity or by choice. They are, as they often remind us, aimlessly drifting, trying to figure out their lives or escape from them. They are lonely. Alienated from the society in which they live. It is as if they are living out the lyrics from Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone: "How does it feel? To be without a home/Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone."The unnamed narrator is befriended by a couple he encounters in a café, Jacqueline and Gérard Van Bever. The couple appears to make their living from gambling, the narrator from selling old books for money. The three of them are drifters, living in in the shabbier section of Paris. Van Bever plays an insignificant role, and he is poorly delineated. And while Jacqueline is the central figure, she nevertheless remains an enigma.Like Jean-Luc Goddard’s Nana(1) in "Vivre-Sa-Vie"—Godard’s ground breaking film that traces the slow and haphazard decent of a young Parisian woman into prostitution—Jacqueline’s motives remain opaque. Jacqueline, like Goddard’s Nana, rarely exhibits emotion. Both women occupy a Paris of coffee bars, pinball machines, tawdry hotels. Jacqueline leaves Van Bever without too much thought or premeditation, just as Nana abandons her husband and child. Jacqueline dreams of escaping to Majorca; Nana dreams of becoming a movie actress: they live in a circumscribed reality in which there is nothing to do but imagine having money and leaving Paris. Whether Nana decides to become a prostitute or drifts into prostitution to keep body and soul together is unclear. Just as it is unclear why Jacqueline accepts money for sex other than it appears she has no other way of earning it. Both women appear impassive and dissociated from themselves except for the drive to fulfill their vision of life. The two of them live their lives the best they can.Jacqueline appears to live best by going from man to man. Before departing on one his gambling trips Van Bever leaves Jacqueline under the watch of the narrator. While he is away, as a result of a suggestion by Jacqueline, she and the narrator get high on ether and sleep together. Neither of them inform Van Bever of this indiscretion. Shortly thereafter the couple introduces the narrator to a friend of theirs, Pierre Cartaud. As it turns out, he is having sex with Jacqueline from time to time and gives her money for this privilege, of which Van Bever is aware. The fact that Jacqueline is Van Bever’s girlfriend, and that she has sex with Cartaud for money, does not give the narrator pause, nor stop him from continuing to sleep with her.One day Jacqueline suggests that the narrator sneak into Cartaud’s apartment and steal a briefcase full of money so they can escape Paris. Thrilled at the prospect of having Jacqueline to himself, he commits the crime. Afterwards while waiting to meet up with Jacqueline, he fantasizes writing on pieces of paper the names and places of the people that have become part of his life. This exercise causes him to be overcome by the arbitrary nature of his existence: "So this was my life? So my whole existence at this moment came down to about twenty unconnected names and addresses that had nothing in common but me? And why these rather than others? What did I have to do with these names and places?" For the crime he commits Jacqueline rewards him by taking him out of Paris: the city in which he was aimlessly adrift, amidst a meaningless concatenation of names and addresses.While some commentators have called this a love story I’m not inclined to see it that way. The narrator’s happiness (a rare and unusual sentiment in Modiano’s work) has little or nothing to do with his being in love with Jacqueline and, I think, more to do with his escape from "…all the gray, uncertain years I had lived up to then." By taking him with her to London, she frees him from himself. When they arrive there: "When the taxi turned onto the Mall and that shady, tree-lined avenue opened up before me, the first twenty years of my life fell to dust, like a weight, like hand-cuffs or a harness that I never thought I would be free of. Just like that, nothing remained of all those years. And if happiness was the fleeting euphoria I felt that afternoon, then for the first time in my existence I was happy."In London, the narrator and Jacqueline are nearly destitute (there was very little money in that suitcase). In a way their life is the mirror image of what it was in Paris, except this time the narrator and Jacqueline are a couple. They meet a woman in a café, Linda Jacobsen, who introduces them to an older man, Peter Rachman, who likes young people. He takes an immediate interest in Jacqueline. Soon she begins accepting money from Rachman, just as she did from Cartaud, and the narrator realizes that she has found a way to express her gratitude to Rachman, just as she had with Cartaud. While the narrator begins writing a novel (about two young people), and ignoring the situation, as did Van Bever, Jacqueline begins going out at night with Linda and coming home in the early hours of the morning. One day she vanishes without a trace, leaving the narrator, just as she left Van Bever.Fifteen years later, back in Paris, the narrator encounters Jacqueline again. He spots her in the street and follows her to a party. He learns she is married and has changed her identity: she is now called Thérèse Caisley. At first she doesn’t acknowledge him, but over the course of the evening he breaks through to her. They leave the party together and she offers to drive him home. On the way they stop in a nearby park, deserted at this hour. She parks the car under some trees and once again they fall into each other’s arms.Fifteen years after the interlude at the party he sees her once again. They are on the metro together. She doesn’t recognize him. He follows her. She looks weary and her face thinner. He had been dreaming about her lately: "I saw her in a little fishing port on the Mediterranean, sitting on the ground, knitting endlessly in the sunlight. Next to her, a saucer where passers-by left coins." This time he does not engage her and leaves us with a final image of her: a lonely woman standing at a bar, pouring herself a glass of beer. A far better fate than the one that befalls Goddard’s Nana.1. Some readers will be familiar with the name Nana as it is a novel by Emile Zola (completed in 1880) in which the eponymous heroine is a prostitute who brings wreak and ruin to each of the successive men with whom she is involved—up until the day she dies from smallpox.See my complete review of Modiano at: [...]

Another great read from Patrick Modiano. The translator points out that once again the central characters are "caught up in a pattern of exclusion, imminent danger, uncertain or concealed identities; time and again they find themselves in milieux that are about to be wiped out by the approaching shadows." The narrator is nameless, and central characters are afraid of "being noticed", and someone always disappears. Identity, or loss of identity, are constant themes. Some critics say that it is almost as if he is always writing the same book. There is some validity to that, but I always find a uniqueness in everything I have read so far.

Out of the Dark is Patrick Modiano’s reflection on a long-ago love affair, or perhaps more accurately temporary association of unlike personalities brought together by youth, poverty and disparate hopes. Like his other works now available in English, the characters are tauntingly vague, never what they seem to be, often corrupt. Because this is not love, there is a clinical aspect to their relationship. The male narrator observes the young woman casually prostituting herself without any emotional response. Modiano’s fascination with the Parisian underworld is evident, but sometimes it may be of more interest to him than to the reader. Youth cannot be recovered, truth cannot be discovered, and the two let time and distance separate them without resistance or remorse.Like other recent Modiano translations into English, this was rushed onto Kindle with an embarrassing number of typos and errors. For the price the publisher charges, it can surely find someone to read the Kindle edition before publishing it. Why this novel has European Women Writers in parenthesis after the title escapes me. Modiano and his readers deserve better.

After I read this I realized that it reminded me of two other novels: The Great Gatsby and In Search of Lost Time.The Great Gatsby because both protagonists pursue a woman who has moved on, compromised her values to acquire material things, while the protagonist has not, at least not completely. So, in some portion, it is about unrequited love, romance and the failure to mature (as that word is commonly used).It made me think of In Search of Lost Time as seen through the eyes of an existentialist, while Proust sees accurate memory as the device critical to creating art and that art provides temporary salvation from oblivion (part of the French title of Modiano's novel), Modiano paints a reality that has no certainty except for loss including loss of accurate memory, where all that remains is mutability, uncertainty and loss.An excellent novel.

Came in good condition, satisfied 👍🏾

This has nothing to do with European Women Writers.

Modiano is an amazing writer. This book has a similar flavor to his other books but I did not find it as engaging as Suspended Sentences.

Modiano is in a league of his own. Love, passion, pangs, separation, angst....so much in so few words. A masterpiece.

intelligent, sad, original, sophisticated but reads with fluency