The Search Warrant - Patrick Modiano (Harvill Press 2000)
- Patrick Scanlan
- Jan 30, 2018
- 2 min read
They are the sort of people who leave few traces. Virtually anonymous. Inseparable from those Paris streets, those suburban landscapes where, by chance, I discovered they had lived.
People ask - why did Modiano win the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature? This book provides at least a part of the answer. It is a painstakingly researched novel which details aspects of the Nazi occupation of Paris and the ways in which many Parisians reacted to it. It is also an imaginative novel about the inhuman treatment of Jews in wartime Paris, a persecution which led inexorably to the detention centres and trains to Auschwitz. But it is much more besides. Modiano is obsessed philosophically with ‘the past’, about how we can be sure about what we know, and about all the many coincidences and ‘what ifs’ that occur along the way. To illustrate the point, he examines the true story of a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl, Dora Bruder, who ran away from her Parisian Convent school in 1941 only to be picked up by the police and sent to a detention centre and, from there, to Auschwitz. For Modiano the past is multi-layered, and this helps to explain the human condition. “In writing this book, I am sending out signals, like a lighthouse beacon in whose power to illuminate the darkness I have, alas, no faith. But I have hope.” Everywhere Modiano looks there are reminders of the past. People have similar experiences. What happened to Dora Bruder in 1941 also happened to Modiano in 1961: they both ran away from school at fifteen. They must have experienced similar emotions and probably had similar reasons. Places don’t change much either. The Clignancourt area of the 18th arrondissement in northern Paris in the 1940s is still recognisable in the 1960s when Modiano had a girlfriend there, and in the late 1990s when the novel was written. The garden in Picpus, which Victor Hugo describes in Les Miserables, and in which Cosette and Jean Valjean hide from a police patrol, is in the same place as the Convent that Dora runs away from in 1941. Like the historian that he isn’t, Modiano starts with the sources. He discovers a ‘missing persons' advert in Paris Soir in December 1941 in which her parents have posted Dora as being absent from her Convent school. But soon he speculates about how and why that advert came about, and then you are in his imaginative world of the 1940s which he links with his experiences of post-war Paris. Everywhere he goes, every archive register of the occupation he reads, he sees the intermingling of past and present. His difficult search for Dora’s wartime records in the 1980s reminds him of the petty-minded officials who made her life hell in the detention centre at Tourelles in 1942. In this way his imaginative recreation of occupied Paris is far more satisfying than a mere historical account. Modiano’s achievement in this remarkable novel is to make the past come alive by reconstructing the lives of “the sort of people who leave few traces”.
Comments