Born in 1945, Patrick Modiano published his first novella in 1969. By 1992, when After the Circus was published in France, Modiano had published more than ten novels and novellas subsequently translated into English. Modiano tinges his fiction with regret for lost loves and nostalgia for lost urban places. Modiano’s novels are inevitably mournful and nostalgic. Modiano always draws me deeply into his novels: his stories become my stories, even though his possess more drama and more veiled danger than mine. Some of his Modiano’s stories I believe more than others. But even if I don’t always believe Modiano’s stories, their undertones reverberate.
After the Circus contains all of the elements familiar to and loved by Modiano’s fans. There’s Lucien, an eighteen-year-old boy, enrolled in university solely to avoid the draft and left to his own devices in early 1950s Paris. As typical of Modiano, there’s the seemingly casual mention of a well-known person—here, Chester Himes, the American writer who settled in Paris after World War Two—to provide verisimilitude for time and place. There’s Lucien’s father, both physically absent after fleeing to Switzerland for unclear reasons and emotionally absent. Here’s Lucien, describing both his father and Grabley, his father’s closest friend: ”Naturally, I wasn’t expecting any moral support from Grabley. He had something in common with my father: they both wore suits, ties, and shoes like everyone else. They spoke unaccented French, smoked cigarettes, drank espresso, and ate oysters. But when in their company, you were seized by doubt and you felt like touching them, the way you rub cloth between your fingers, to make sure they really existed.” There’s Gisèle, or perhaps her name is really Suzanne Kraay, just a few years older than Lucien, married, separated, perhaps an occasional prostitute. There are two shady slightly older men—Pierre Ansart and Jacques de Bavière—both simultaneously generous and scheming. There’s an apparent crime, perhaps a murder committed by Ansart and de Bavière, suckering in Lucien and Gisèle’s credulous participation. There’s death ending Lucien and Gisèle’s romance, just before their planned fleeing to Rome. And of course, all Modiano's characters lie about some part of their identities: their ages, names, backgrounds, or intentions.
Most emblematic of Modiano, After the Circus portrays Lucien about ten years later in his life, grieving over his past. Lucien’s grief and regret live in his dreams: ”Sometimes I dream that I’m with her, in the middle of the reception lobby. The night porter is wearing a threadbare stationmaster’s uniform. He comes over to hand us our key. The elevator no longer works and we climb up a marble stairway. On the first floor, we try in vain to find our room. We pass through the large dining room shrouded in darkness and get lost in the corridors, We end up in an old waiting room lit by a single naked bulb in the ceiling. We sit on the only surviving bench. The station is no longer operational, but you never know: the train for Rome might pass through, by mistake, and stop for a few seconds, just long enough for us to climb aboard.”. Also as usual with Modiano, there’s regret and grief symbolized in a building or neighborhood: ”I would come to know this area better several years later, and more than once I passed by the apartment house where we saw Ansart that evening. It was number 14, Rue Raffet. But topographical details have a strange effect on me: instead of clarifying and sharpening images from the past, they give me a harrowing sensation of emptiness and severed relationships.” And ”Later, I would often return to that area, and each time the stairways on Rue de Alboni reminded me of the Saturday when I had walked around there, waiting for her. It was November, but in my memory, because of the sun that day, a summer light bathes the neighborhood.”
Not my favorite Modiano, even among his pre-1992 novels. But as with all Modiano novels, beautifully executed, deeply troubling, and thought-provoking. 4.5 Modiano stars.