Maybe that's hell: "Haunting the corridors of the metro for eternity with a yellow coat." But as a punishment for what fault? This woman in yellow whom the narrator meets one day at the Châtelet metro station and in whom she recognizes her mother, what is she guilty of? Of having lied? We thought she died in Morocco and she lived in Paris? To have abandoned his daughter, the one who was called the Little Jewel, at the time when she dreamed of making a career in the entertainment industry? Only proper names would perhaps allow us to retrace the past, to know who this enigmatic woman really was: Suzanne Cardères, according to the civil status or the Countess Sonia O'Dauyé at the time of her dreams of grandeur, or La Boche after the war when she had to flee to Morocco to avoid being shorn or Trompe-la-Mort while she survives miserably in a corner of the Parisian suburbs?
The latest Modiano is a melancholic detective novel without culprits where there are only victims, characters in dereliction like this Little Jewel who can't get over a childhood without a father, without even the love of a mother, from all those wounds that everyday life only revives. And whose only consolation is the music of words, the name of a café in Paris in the fifties, a poem on the radio in an unknown language, the mysterious names of men and women who invent an identity for themselves to better forget their unattractive lives. Modiano's music, this singular style, has never been more poignant than in this strange walk in the footsteps of a ravaged childhood. --Yves Bellec
