PRAISE FOR SUSPENDED SENTENCES:
“Vividly translated by Mark Polizzotti . . . [and] as good a place as any to enter the long, slow-moving river of Modiano’s fiction.”
ALAN RIDING New York Times Book Review
“A timely glimpse at [Modiano’s] fixations. . . . In Mark Polizzotti’s spare and elegant translation, the writing conveys a sense of dreamy unease in which the real, the hypothesized, and the half-forgotten blend into a shimmering vagueness.”
SAM SACKS, Wall Street Journal
“Mr. Modiano writes clear, languid, and urbane sentences in Mr. Polizzotti’s agile translation. . . . These novellas have a mood. They cast a spell.”
DWIGHT GARNER New York Times
“Elegant . . . quietly unpretentious, approachable. . . . Though enigmatic and open-ended, Modiano’s remembrances of things past and his probings of personal identity are presented with a surprisingly light touch. He is, all in all, quite an endearing Nobelist.”
MICHAEL DIRDA, Washington Post
PRAISE FOR PARIS NOCTURNE:
“This novel provides a superb and—at 160 pages—accessible entry to [Modiano’s] writings. . . . The narrator’s search for Jacqueline propels the novel forward with the intensity of a noir. But Modiano is not writing mere pulp; the novel’s true center is the past’s pull, the way memories lay dormant for years only to explode ‘like a time bomb.’”
Publishers Weekly
PRAISE FOR AFTER THE CIRCUS:
“[After the Circus] transposes Modiano’s favorite themes into a taut, hard-boiled crime story. . . . Modiano is writing metaphysical mystery stories, in which the search for answers is never afforded an easy solution. The more of Modiano’s work you read, the more familiar and inevitable his peculiar set of obsessions starts to feel—which is one sign of a major writer.”
ADAM KIRSCH Daily Beast
PRAISE FOR LITTLE JEWEL:
“Patrick Modiano has never better expressed the quintessence of his art than in this somnambulistic novel. . . . Flaubert, we know, dreamed of writing a book ex nihilo, one that holds by sheer force of style, responds to the laws of pure rhetoric, can’t be reduced to the author’s life, and is, finally, superior. Little Jewel is Modiano’s Bovary.”
JÉRÔME GARCIN Le Nouvel Observateur
PRAISE FOR PEDIGREE:
“Compelling . . . highly effective. . . . Mr. Modiano depends for effect not on rhetorical declaration or emotional outburst but on the accumulation of minor details. He is a writer unlike any other and a worthy recipient of the Nobel.”
JAMES CAMPBELL, Wall Street Journal
Such Fine Boys
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF WORKS BY PATRICK MODIANO
From Yale University Press
After the Circus
Little Jewel
Paris Nocturne
Pedigree: A Memoir
Such Fine Boys
Sundays in August
Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas (Afterimage, Suspended Sentences, and Flowers of Ruin)
Also available or forthcoming
The Black Notebook
Catherine Certitude
Dora Bruder
Honeymoon
In the Café of Lost Youth
Lacombe Lucien
Missing Person
Out of the Dark
So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighborhood
The Occupation Trilogy (The Night Watch, Ring Roads, and La Place de l’Etoile)
A Trace of Malice
Villa Triste
Young Once
Such Fine Boys
PATRICK MODIANO
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY MARK POLIZZOTTI WITH A FOREWORD BY J. M. G. LE CLÉZIO
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW HAVEN & LONDON
The translator would like to thank Rebecca Thompson for her excellent suggestions.
The Margellos World Republic of Letters is dedicated to making literary works from around the globe available in English through translation. It brings to the English-speaking world the work of leading poets, novelists, essayists, philosophers, and playwrights from Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East to stimulate international discourse and creative exchange.
English translation copyright © 2017 by Mark Polizzotti. Foreword copyright 1999 by J. M. G. Le Clézio. Originally published as De si braves garçons, © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1982. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office).
Set in Electra and Nobel types by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016962442
ISBN 978-0-300-22334-7 (paperback : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR RUDY
FOR SIMONE
. . . Such a fine boy!
—Turgenev, “Bezhin Meadow”
CONTENTS
Foreword to the French Edition: Modiano, or Lightness J. M. G. Le Clézio
Such Fine Boys
FOREWORD TO THE FRENCH EDITION: MODIANO, OR LIGHTNESS
Over the past three decades, Patrick Modiano has built a body of work on the most consequential of themes: the theme of memory, of the ghosts that circulate through the postwar world and among its survivors.
He does not approach this theme with a polemicist’s plume or avenger’s sword. Rather, he treats it like a research component or analytical tool, rendering it via allusions, enigmas, measured accents. He does not offer up heroes or advance toward a goal. He proceeds by questions rather than affirmations.
In this tightly woven ensemble—for Modiano’s writings never succumb to facility or digression, never stray from the line he established as of his first volume, La Place de l’Etoile (leaving aside his slight deviation into film with Lacombe Lucien)—Such Fine Boys occupies a place apart, first by its structure, a suite of brief narratives, like interconnected short stories; then by its implicit reference to the author’s personal experience.
Of all Modiano’s novels, this is at once the clearest, the purest, and the most complex. Each of his major themes appears in it, linking this book with both his previous volumes and those that followed. This is my favorite of Modiano’s works, because it’s the one that best expresses the admirable lightness firing his imagination.
There are moments of exceptional power in this series of backward glances, reminiscent—as is the author’s chosen title—of the art of Ivan Turgenev, in books like Mumu, First Love, or the posthumously published Prose Poems. With Modiano, we find the same discreet, almost casual depth, the same humor, the same solitary peculiarity. The settings radiate a muted anxiety, like the apartment of Doctor Genia Karvé, with that disturbingly nostalgic line, “Happy days once more.”
In cruel, precise strokes, Modiano brushes the portraits of lost women—or rather, loose women, in every sense of the word—who haunt the memory of the wartime generation: Martine, blinded by love, who falls prey to a con man named Baby; Arlette d’Alwyn, around whom floats a slight whiff of ruin.
This murky world, a world superficial to the point of irresponsibility, so self-absorbed that it tips into evil, is the world that has engendered ev
ery tragedy; it lets itself be carried by the tide of history without playing any part in it, like a straw on the waves. Though it may be as vain and insignificant as those old façades in rich neighborhoods, this is the world we enter into here, to discover its tortuous weft and often venomous charm.
It is a world that we cannot view with indifference, for Modiano shows it through the pitiless but generous eyes of adolescence. Valvert, the tony, somewhat vacant boarding school—targeted by the inevitable march of time; fated, as we know from the first line, not to survive the modern age—becomes the proverbial laboratory, much like Raymond Roussel’s Locus Solus, in which the contemporary mythos was invented.
What redeems this despicable world is the presence of childhood, the childhood that remains within each of us—not a preciously preserved golden age, but the kind of childhood that knows how to observe and judge, the dark-eyed childhood that Colette writes about, which reduces adults’ passions and ambitions to nil, along with their hunger for gold and their grandiose follies.
The passages of Such Fine Boys in which Modiano describes the tender bond between the youthful narrator and Little Jewel, who has been abandoned and abused by her overambitious mother, are among the loveliest pages written in the French language in the second half of the twentieth century.
If you haven’t yet read this novel, or haven’t read it in a long time, come inside without further delay, for it holds many a key to Modiano’s secretive and compelling body of work.
J. M. G. Le Clézio
April 1999
Such Fine Boys
I.
A wide gravel drive rose in a gentle slope to the Castle. But what surprised you at first, to your right, in front of the infirmary, was the white flagpole with the French tricolor flapping at the top. Every morning, one of us hoisted the flag up the pole, after Mr. Jeanschmidt had given the order:
“Platoon—atten-tion!”
The flag rose slowly. Mr. Jeanschmidt stood at attention with us. His deep voice broke the silence.
“At ease . . . About, left . . . Forward, march!”
In quickstep, we followed the wide driveway to the Castle.
I believe Mr. Jeanschmidt wanted to acclimate us—accidental children, who belonged nowhere—to the benefits of discipline and the comfort of a homeland. Every November 11, we would join in the town ceremonies. We assembled in ranks on the Castle patio, wearing our navy blue blazers with matching knit ties. Pedro Jeanschmidt—we had nicknamed our principal Pedro—gave the departure signal. We marched in quickstep down the drive, Pedro leading the way, followed by his pupils in descending order of height. At the head of each class were the three tallest: one carried flowers, another the French flag, the third our school banner, gold triangle on midnight blue. Over time, most of my schoolmates served as standard-bearer: Echevarietta, Charell, McFowles, Desoto, Newman, Karvé, Moncef el Okbi, Corcuera, Archibald, Firouz, Monterey, Coemtzopoulos, who was half-Greek and half-Ethiopian . . . We marched through the gate and crossed the old stone bridge over the Bièvre River. Then we came to the town hall, formerly the home of the textile magnate Oberkampf; his oxidized bronze statue stood on its marble pedestal and watched through hollow eyes as we filed past. After that was the railroad crossing. When the barrier was down and the signal announced an oncoming train, we stood still, at attention. The barrier creaked upright and Pedro jerked his arm forward, like a mountain guide. We resumed our march. Along the town’s main street, children on the sidewalks cheered us as if we were soldiers home from the war. We went to join the real veterans gathered on the church square. Once more Pedro barked the order to stand at attention. And one after another, the students stepped forward to lay a wreath at the base of the Monument to the Unknown Soldier.
The Valvert School for Boys occupied the former property of a certain Valvert, who had been an intimate of the comte d’Artois and accompanied him into exile under the Revolution. Later, as an officer in the Russian army, he fell at the Battle of Austerlitz, fighting against his own countrymen in the uniform of the Izmailovsky Regiment. All that remained of him was his name and a pink marble colonnade, now half ruined, at the back of the park.
My schoolmates and I were raised under that man’s morose tutelage, and perhaps some of us, without realizing it, still bear the traces.
Pedro’s house was set back from the foot of the drive, opposite the flagpole and the infirmary. His thatched cottage with its vivid colors reminded us of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. An impeccable flowerbed surrounded it, tended by Pedro himself.
He invited me in only once, the evening when I’d run away. I had spent long hours wandering around the Champs-Elysées, searching for who knows what, before I gave up and went back to the school. The class monitor had said Pedro was expecting me.
The highly polished furniture, the floor tiles, china, and small tinted windowpanes, all lit by a single lamp, were like something out of a Dutch interior. Pedro sat behind a large antique wooden desk, smoking a pipe.
“Why did you run away this afternoon? Are you unhappy here?”
The question surprised me.
“No . . . Not particularly.”
“I’ll let it go this time. But you’re grounded.”
The two of us had remained facing each other in silence for several minutes, Pedro puffing thoughtfully on his pipe. He saw me to the door.
“Let’s not do it again.”
He gave me a sad, affectionate look.
“If you feel like talking, come see me. I wouldn’t want you to be unhappy.”
I walked up the driveway toward the Castle, then looked back. Pedro was standing on his porch. Normally, everything about him—his chiseled face, stocky build, pipe, and Alpine Swiss accent—exuded strength. But that evening, for the first time, he had seemed worried. Because I had run away? Perhaps he was thinking about our future, after we’d left Valvert—his realm, increasingly surrounded by a hostile, unfathomable world—when he, Pedro, could no longer protect us.
The driveway cut across the wide expanse of lawn where we spent afternoon and evening recess and played field hockey. At the far end of the lawn, near the wall surrounding the property, stood a bunker tall as a brownstone, left over from the war, when the estate had housed the Luftwaffe general staff. Behind it, a dirt path that skirted the surrounding wall wended its way to Pedro’s cottage and the main gate. A bit farther down from the bunker was an old greenhouse converted into a gymnasium.
Often, in my dreams, I follow the driveway up to the Castle, passing a brown shed on my right: the hut where we changed into our sports gear. Finally, I arrive at the graveled patio of the Castle, a white two-story building with a porch ringed by a handrail. It had been built at the end of the nineteenth century, modeled on the castle at Malmaison. I climb the porch steps and push open the door, which automatically clicks shut behind me. I am in the black-and-white checkerboard foyer that leads to the two dining halls.
From the left wing of the Castle, which we called the “New Wing”—Pedro had built it in the early fifties—a path sloped down to the Swiss Yard, which our principal had named after his native land. I don’t take this path in my dreams, but instead enter the labyrinth, which was off-limits to us, and in which only Pedro and the faculty were allowed. A narrow, leafy passage, circular clearings and bowers, stone benches, the scent of privet. The labyrinth, too, opened onto the Swiss Yard.
This yard was surrounded, as if in a village square, by the mismatched houses used for classrooms or dormitories, with bedrooms shared by five or six of us. Each house had its own name: the Hermitage, which looked like a country manor; the Nursery, a Norman villa with half-timbering; the Green Pavilion; the Home; the Source, with its minaret; the Studio; the Gully; and the Chalet, which could have passed for one of those old Alpine hotels that some eccentric millionaire had transplanted here piece by piece. At the back of the yard, they had converted a former stable with turret into a movie house and theater.
We would assemble in the ya
rd at around noon, before heading in ranks up to the Castle for lunch, or whenever Pedro wanted to make an important announcement. We would say, “Swiss Yard, such-and-such o’clock,” and these sibylline words were meaningful only to us.
I lived in every house on that yard, but my favorite was the Green Pavilion. It owed its name to the ivy eating away at its façade. Under the balcony of the Green Pavilion, we would take shelter from the rain during recess. An outside staircase with a finely tooled wooden ramp led to the upper floors. The first floor housed the library. For a long time, I shared a room on the second floor with Charell, McFowles, Newman, and the future actor Edmond Claude.
On spring evenings, we would sit near the open window in the Green Pavilion and smoke. We had to wait until very late, when all was quiet. We had our choice of two windows: one looked out on the Swiss Yard, where Pedro sometimes made his rounds, wearing a tartan robe and puffing on his pipe; and the other, smaller one, scarcely more than a dormer, overlooked a country road that ran alongside the Bièvre.
Edmond Claude and Newman wanted to get a rope, so we could let ourselves out and down the wall. McFowles and Charell had decided we would catch the train, whose whistle we heard every night at the same hour.
But where did that train go?
II.
Some of our teachers lived in one or other of the houses on the Swiss Yard, and Pedro had appointed them “captains” of those buildings. They were responsible for keeping order with the help of “cadets,” students recruited from the junior and senior years. These cadets conducted evening “inspections,” checking to see that beds were properly made, closets kept neat, shoes shined. After nine o’clock curfew, the cadets made sure everyone was asleep and no one turned his lights back on.
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