New-York, New-York

The narrator and amnesiac private eye "Guy" in Patrick Modiano's Missing Person contineus to search for his own identity, and through a series of improbable, dreamlike stages (now halfway through this short novel) - he finds the apartment where he apparently used to live, meets at last a woman who seems to recognize him, learns from her through careful questioning (he never lets on that he has "lost" his identity and memory) that he was a diplomat with most likely the Dominican Embassy with the odd name of Pedro McAvoy and that she'd last heard of him when he'd left the country with his then-wife. Hm, of course we are not expected to take this series of revelations literally - seems very unlikely that no one would recognize him over the past 8 years, that he would have lost not only his memory but his fluency in Spanish, and so on - and all these apparent facts are malleable - what's true on page 60 may be untrue by page 160. As noted yesterday, his quest to find his identity is like a parable for the life of an everyman/woman - we all are in constant search of our memory and in a constant "struggle" to form our own unique identity (pace Knausgaard). The dark and atmospheric style of this novel - deserted neighborhoods, rain-spattered nights, lonely street corners and near-deserted parks and grounds, ruined chateaux - remind me a little of Bolano and, w/out the historical context, of Sebald: they're all in the same school of European writing in thrall to the American detective tradition. One salient feature of Modiano's novel, however, is the fun he has w/Paris geography (recalling O'Neill's Netherland a la NYC) and w/ Paris street names - some are real of course, but I would suspect some are fabricated and evocative (as w/ Proust, to a degree). Can there really be an Avenue New-York? (Yes, there is, I looked it up - but I believe Modiano sets a scene there largely for the name, not the location itself.)