What I'm reading? Often Modiano

Yep, I read a lot of Patrick Modiano -- thank God he is so prolific!

So I figured why not review his latest work from Yale University Press?

It's not his best, as I say in this review below for Cleaver Magazine, a lit mag based in Philadelphia and run by some fellow Bennington Writing Seminar alums, but you won't regret reading it (and in the review I tell you which books to seek out, including the title in the picture).

Here's a link to the full review:

https://www.cleavermagazine.com/scene-of-the-crime-a-novel-by-patrick-modianom-reviewed-by-jeanne-bonner/

As I mention in the review, the action in Scene of the Crime revolves around a character called Jean Bosmans who stumbles upon a series of coincidences involving his childhood home and a group of shady individuals who are alarmingly interested in his past.

The plot is par for the course for this French Nobel Laureate who has dedicated his literary career to exhuming the ghosts of wartime Paris through semi-autobiographical fiction.

The plot is also beside the point—and in some ways, I love that.

Nearly all of Modiano’s works touch on memory and childhood, as the author pieces together fictionalized episodes with his father, a shadowy figure who was on the run during World War II because of his Jewish heritage and willing to get his hands dirty to stay free. Born in 1945, Modiano has trained his gaze permanently on the war years that immediately preceded his birth, and the post-war years that are often referred to as the Thirty Glorious Years. As Alice Kaplan noted in a 2017 article for the Paris Review, Modiano likes to say he “is a child of the war.” She quotes him as saying: “Faced with the silence of our parents we worked it all out as if we had lived it ourselves.”

Modiano has been accused of writing the same book over and over. Many writers have been the subject of such an accusation and it’s probably true, but few are as magnanimous about it. Indeed, Modiano has admitted it during interviews, perhaps because he doesn’t see it as an insult or a problem.

Similarly, I enjoy reading his work because I'm always hoping he will add to the portrait he's been building of his father. And of course he always does. Sometimes more satisfactorily, sometimes less so.

But he's sifting through the wreckage of memories, and using fiction to uncover something that's even truer than fact.

I enjoy Modiano so much that I've begun reading one of his books in French -- desperately relying on knowledge I stored up for the most part back in Junior High School! I keep the English translation in my lap and refer to it every other sentence -- what passes for fun in my world.

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