L'horizon by Patrick Modiano

Bosmans belongs nowhere. Without roots, seemingly without friends, and with the only trace of his family an estranged mother who demands money from him each time they meet, he wanders the labyrinthine ways of Paris and of his mind in an attempt to make sense of the disjointed memories that haunt him.

In L’horizon, Patrick Modiano presents us with a world at once small – Bosmans appears to lead a solitary life, and the repeated appearances of the same characters and references give us the impression that his horizons are very narrow – and somehow infinitely extended, in the long Paris streets where a walk can seem to last years without ever leading to a destination. This impression is created largely by an extensive use of flashback. The Bosmans who is narrating is a relatively old man, and most of the events he recounts took place several decades earlier. A simple encounter can trigger memories of events that themselves occurred over a period of months or years, but which take only a few seconds to recall.

Bosmans is forever attempting to pin things down. The novel begins with him and his notebook, in which he has begun to jot down memories in an attempt to place them: “a date, an exact location, a name whose spelling escaped him”. He is frustrated by the vagueness of his recollections, and yet we sense that really he prefers it that way. Spotting a figure from his past in a café, he contemplates approaching her, telling himself that she “will finally give me all the explanations, from the beginning”; but he does not get up, realising that “I prefer things to remain hazy.” He thinks obsessively of Margaret Le Coz, who vanished giving no explanation many years before; and yet his searches for her since her disappearance seem to have taken place only in his mind.

In L’horizon, the people and the course of events are hazy, while certain details of a building or street from thirty years before are recalled with a peculiar vividness. Characters are reduced to vague figures that appear and disappear, often leaving a sense of unease or menace behind them. Even Margaret is hardly more than a shadow in Bosmans’ memories of her; we know that she is timid and keeps a low-profile, but little else. The few recalled conversations between her and Bosmans are banal, and he demonstrates almost no curiosity despite knowing next to nothing about her. Her past is shrouded in mystery, yet Bosmans does not probe and does not even seem to wonder. The chief factor bringing them together is the sense of being “nothing people”, with no family and no place in the world.

How to create a narrative out of all this vagueness? This is Bosmans’ quest, and is also the difficulty faced by Modiano. L’horizon is not an easy book to begin; the reader is given little to take hold of and, like the narrator, is left swimming in disconnected memories. Without narrative thrust, Modiano has to rely on style, and succeeds beautifully with an elegant lyricism and a perceptive grasp of the elusiveness of human memory. The novel rests on the things imagined but left unsaid and the countless small mysteries of life that are left unresolved. Bosmans likes the new districts of east Paris, which “give you the illusion that you could live a second life there”; but it is unclear what, exactly, he regrets, or what would be different the second time around. The horizon exists, but it remains doubtful that he can move towards it, for life brings the same things back again and again – the same names, the same metro stations – just “when you believe yourself rid of them for good”.

L'horizon is the first Modiano novel I have read, and I'll certainly be coming back for more. He has over forty years of work behind him, including a new novel published earlier this month, so I'm spoilt for choice! It would seem, however, that only a handful of his works have been translated into English - perhaps because his dense, meandering style must prove rather resistant to translation.