Most of all, there is the reality of Albert Modiano’s arrest and unexplained release and the disappearance of Modiano’s beloved brother, about whom he writes in Un pedigree: “Apart from my brother, Rudy, his death, I think that none of what I’ll relate here truly concerns me. I’m writing these pages the way one draws up a report or CV, simply as documentation and to have done with a life that wasn’t my own.” The father, keeper of heavy secrets that he took to the grave, secrets of which his son can uncover only shards; the brother, vanished prematurely, his death bleaching the author’s childhood of its emotional reality: these are the true voids in Modiano’s writing, the mystery that remains unsolved, the ghost who cannot be exorcised, of whom all the other fugitives and absentees in his books are but shades.
And still, it is important to remember that these are fictions — however closely their strands might be woven from Modiano’s own past — and it seems apt to quote once more his remarks from the French omnibus edition, in which he characterizes his novels as “a kind of autobiography, but one that is dreamed-up or imaginary. Even the photographs of my parents have become portraits of imaginary characters. Only my brother, my wife, and my daughters are real.” As for the other figures who lend their presence to these pages, “I used their shadows and especially their names because of the sound; for me, they were nothing more than musical notes.”
With these notes, Modiano has composed a haunting trilogy of love and loss, pitch-perfect in its quiet determination to elucidate the riddles of human identity. Writing, at its best, is a process of discovery, a way of both piercing and preserving a mystery that, by nature, cannot be clarified. Looking back on his attempts to discover the truth about Pacheco, the evidence he has scrupulously compiled, the narrator of Flowers of Ruin reflects: “Without fully realizing it, I began writing my first book. It was neither a vocation nor a particular gift that pushed me to write, but quite simply the enigma posed by a man I had no chance of finding again, and by all those questions that would never have an answer.”
Note on the Translation
Generally speaking, and despite the ambiguities in his narrative strategy, Modiano’s prose style is straightforward and clear — by which I do not mean simple — and I have aimed above all to preserve that limpid quality in this translation. His titles are another matter. While a direct translation worked perfectly well for Flowers of Ruin (Fleurs de ruine), and even allowed me to retain the whiff of Baudelairean spleen, this was not the case with Remise de peine—literally, a stay of sentence, but also a deferral of pain. By titling the English version Suspended Sentences, I hope to have kept both the sense of punishment delayed and the dual resonance by introducing a hint of the writer that young Patoche will eventually become.
Chien de printemps required the most liberty. The title — literally “dog of spring,” figuratively an expletive along the lines of “rotten spring” or “miserable spring”—refers to Jansen’s exclamation (“Goddamn spring”), but also to the actual dog that appears at the end of the book and to the season in which the action occurs. More allusively, the “dog in spring” could be the protagonist himself, sniffing after Jansen to learn his secrets, listless like an abandoned pet after the photographer’s departure. One possibility that occurred to me was “bitch of a spring,” but this neither captured the tone of the relationship nor was a convincing expletive (or, for that matter, a good title). The “dog days” fall in the wrong season, and plays on the word “hound” just seemed silly. Ultimately I decided to forgo the original altogether and concentrate on what this novella seemed most to be about: a retrospective attempt to see, an exercise in hindsight, an afterimage.
AFTERIMAGE
For Dominique
Doorbells, dangling limbs, no one comes this far,
Doorbells, swinging gates, a rage to disappear
No dog has his day
When the master’s gone away
I met Francis Jansen when I was nineteen, in the spring of 1964, and today I want to relate the little I know about him.
It was early morning, in a café on Place Denfert-Rochereau. I was there in the company of a girl my age, and Jansen was at a table facing ours. He was watching us and smiling. Then, from a bag placed next to him on the imitation leather bench, he pulled out a Rolleiflex. I barely realized he’d trained his lens on us — that’s how quick and casual his movements were. He used a Rolleiflex, but I couldn’t say much about Jansen’s technique or the papers he printed on, which infused all his photos with their particular light.
On the morning we met, I remember asking him, out of politeness, what he considered the best kind of camera. He shrugged his shoulders and admitted that, all things considered, he preferred those small black plastic cameras you can buy in toy stores, the kind that squirt water when you press the trigger.
He treated us to coffee and asked us to be his models again, but this time out in the street. An American magazine had hired him to illustrate an article on Paris youth, and he’d chosen the two of us, simple as that: it was easier and would go faster. And even if they weren’t satisfied back in the States, it didn’t matter: he just wanted to get this bread-and-butter assignment over with. We left the café and walked in the sun, and I heard him mutter with his slight accent:
“Goddamn spring.”
A reflection he must have repeated many times that season.
He had us sit on a bench, then he posed us in front of a wall shaded by a row of trees, on Avenue Denfert-Rochereau. I’ve kept one of those shots. My girlfriend and I are sitting on the bench. To me it’s as if they were other people, not us, because of the years that have passed, or maybe because of what Jansen saw through his lens, which we wouldn’t have seen in a mirror at the time: two anonymous teenagers lost in Paris.
We went with him to his studio on Rue Froidevaux, a few steps away. I sensed he was apprehensive about being alone.
The studio was on the ground floor of an apartment building, and you entered it directly from the street. A large room with white walls, at the back of which a small flight of stairs led up to a loft. A bed took up the entire space of the loft. The only furnishings were a gray sofa and two armchairs of matching color. Next to the brick fireplace, three brown leather suitcases stacked one on top of the other. Nothing on the walls. Except two photos. The larger one was of a woman, a certain Colette Laurent, as I would learn. On the other, two men — one of whom was Jansen, younger — were sitting side by side in a shattered bathtub, among some ruins. Despite my shyness, I couldn’t help asking Jansen about them. He’d answered that it was he, with his friend Robert Capa, in Berlin, in August 1945.