Once again, with Patrick Modiano’s latest novel, we take up and follow that “rue des boutiques obscures” (street of dark shops), with its guide-character himself lost, in search of his own past, faltering, as it were, before the real and before memory, forever coming back to the crossroads where, as a very young man, he sought, together with his love, a place in which to exist. This wandering and this quest constitute the ever-renewed matter of Modiano’s novels, between personal path and historical drift, a double horizon that Modiano’s readers never cease, with him, to scrutinize.
Modiano’s heroes are for the most part very young beings, and the narrative depicts them at the moment when their adolescence comes to an end without any clear way having been offered or pointed out to them. Thus Bosmans, the main character of L’horizon (The Horizon), and his friend Margaret are caught in that geographical and human wandering of very young people left to themselves, at the crossroads, during those “years when your life is sown with crossroads, and so many paths open before you that you are spoiled for choice (…) and, as in astronomy, this dark matter was vaster than the visible part of your life. It was infinite.”1
The narrative could be that of the quest for the past alone, by way of the theme of the lost and sought-after woman. But the time of their wandering is dated: with L’Horizon we are in the prewar years, and the gardens where the two young people take refuge in the evening will soon be refuges for the Jews and the stateless who are hunted down. Margaret, arriving in Paris, “had ended up in a hotel, near the Etoile,”2 that star (étoile) whose place is double, and which each of Modiano’s novels redraws, as though, at bottom, every reader of Modiano expected of his novels that they should speak again, in their own way, of that hollow abyss within our time, when the place de l’Etoile was the site of a silent and fatal designation.
Is there an end to the quest? Is the horizon in Berlin — that Berlin in ruins where Bosmans arrives at the end of the novel and of his quest for the lost woman? The city seems at last to offer him what every exile seeks: that “feeling of serenity, with the certainty of having returned to the exact spot from which he had set out one day, to the same place, at the same hour, and in the same season, as two hands meet on the dial when it is noon.”3
Do these two hands really meet? At last, serenity and certainty? Not so sure: the novel ends before the reunion with Margaret; Eurydice remains distant, like a perpetual horizon. A horizon, or a mere “remission of sentence”?