So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood

Memories Of Another Day

Finally lay hands on last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Patrick Modiano’s So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood (translated by Euan Cameron)—the latest of his 30 odd concise and introspective novels most of them set in post World War II France. The celebrated French author’s work had not been translated much into English before he won the Nobel (just one of his long list of awards) and was called by a section of the media, a bestselling author nobody had read. 

Along with a recent edition of The Occupation Trilogy, this novel and a translation of his 2005 memoir of childhood called Pedigree, helped the English-speaking world discover the mysterious French author.  So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood is about a solitary writer named Jean Daragane. He seems to have no friends and a dull daily routine that is rudely disrupted when he receives a phone call from a man who claims to have found his address book. The man, Gilles Ottolini, turns out to be a bit sinister and wants to know about a name—Guy Torstel-- listed in the diary, for which he also enlists the help of an enigmatic young woman, Chantal Grippay.

The name that Daragane can’t even remember, nevertheless forces him to recall a past he has striven to forget, when, as a child, he was abandoned by his parents and lived with a dancer and courtesan called Annie Astrand, in the Paris suburbs. Ottolini points out that the name was mentioned in his first book, which Daragne can’t remember either, so long ago was it. However, a connection is proved and Daragne is forced go into flashback.

Bit by bit, flashes of memory reveal a murder, an escape, lots of subterfuge and the darkness of collaboration with the Germans during the occupation of France during the War. A lot is left unsaid for the reader to guess at between the lines.

This book is more atmosphere than plot—a sense of foreboding wrapped in its pages right from the harsh phone ring that disrupts the calm of the protagonist’s life; then it’s clear that there was a lot churning his mind all the time, the dark memories that continue to haunt him and make him the man he is. Ottolini is just the catalyst for Darange to confront his past.

Modiano keeps returning to the period of the Nazi occupation, and his memoir gives a hint of why—like Daragne’s past is an echo of Modiano’s own. The dubious businesses his father conducted during the War (he writes about this dispassionately in Pedigree) and the unsavoury company he kept seems to given Modiano a lot to write about in his novels.

The genre of this book would be noted as ‘suspense’ but the subtlety of his style does not make it a thriller in the accepted sense of the word.

So You Don’t Get Lost In The Neighborhood

by Patrick Modiano

(Translated by Euan Cameron)

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Pages: 160