Backlisted - Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano

Episode Date: May 1, 2017

Novelist Rupert Thomson joins John & Andy to talk about the work of French author Patrick Modiano, who's work explores the effect of the German occupation of his homeland during the Second World War. There's also a special edition of 'What I've Read This Week', where John talks about 'Identity of England' by Robert Colls, while Andy sets a bit of a puzzle...Timings: (may differ due to adverts)5'17 - Anon. by Anon.14'04 - Identity of England by Robert Coles21'39 - Narcissism for Beginners by Martine McDonagh24'00 - Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance.

Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. So, Rupert Thompson, you have the one in a hundred distinction of having been chosen by David Bowie in his now famous list of a hundred favourite books. And we've talked about that list on Backlisted several times. I read a few books from it because I was so fascinated to see them.

We did quite a few for a while, didn't we? I'm actually one of the few writers on that list who's still alive. What was it? So can you remember when you first were alerted to it? Yes, it was a funny story because I was living in Rome. It was 1996.

And I got this phone call one day. Dear Rupert. From an interview magazine. Do you remember that? it was 1996 and I got this phone call one day from Interview Magazine remember that? Warhol's magazine, the huge magazine as it was then and I thought this was strange and they said

we've got this new we've had this great new idea which is to have really famous people interviewing people who are less famous I knew immediately which one I was going to be really famous people interviewing people who are less famous. I knew immediately which one I was going to be. So I said, who's the really famous person? And they said, David Bowie.

And I kind of fell off my chair. And when I was back on it again, I said, sort of, why? And they said, it's because he's read this book of yours called The Insult, and he really loves it, and, you know, so we thought it would be a good idea. Of course, it never happened, and I never met him, which I still regret. And I thought he'd kind of forgotten all about that. So when that 2013 list came out, you know, the must read books of all time, whatever it was called, I was really kind of thrilled that he remembered that he'd loved it and he'd put it on the list. I may have jogged his memory as well, because I wrote a memoir in 2010

called This Party's Got to Stop. He appears in that book a couple of times. There's one particular scene I wrote about watching the famous Hammersmith Apollo. Was it the 1973? Oh, the Odeon. The last, you know, the famous last Ziggy. And I wrote a scene where me and my brother on Vodka and Orange watch this at the Curzon in Eastbourne and the sound is bad, unlike this programme.

And it's a scene that worked really well when I read it out loud when I, you know, festivals and stuff. So I made sure that got to him. I think it got to him, because I found out who his US manager was. Shall we start? Hello, and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books.

You join us, hold up in a shabby hotel on the outskirts of Paris, courtesy of our sponsors Unbound, the website which brings authors and readers together to create something special. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound. And I'm Andy Miller, author of Tess of the d'Urbervilles. And joining us today is Rupert Thompson. Hello, Rupert. Hi.

That's Rupert who you heard talking earlier. Author of such books as your first book, well, your first novel was Dreams of Leaving. Dreams of Leaving. And you mentioned the memoir, This Party's Got to Stop. That was published when? 2010. 2010. And I believe in a year's time,

you have a novel. Is it your... 11th novel. 11th novel, Never Anyone But You. Yeah. I saw you tweeting about that the other day. It sounds great. You tweeted a picture of the page proofs, of manuscripts?

It's not the proofs. It's something they do, something other press do in America, which is unusual, which is they produce a book that's, they produce an uncorrected manuscript, which precedes an uncorrected proof. So you've got, and what I love about it is it's completely unadorned. It's just a white book with black writing on it that says the title, the name of the author, and uncorrected manuscript and then spring 2018 there's something

quite french about about that yeah yeah yeah what did you say one year to go i said what only one year to wait but several we were saying earlier that people will respond to that game why why so long as you said because that's that's how long it takes it's really hard i mean it's a persistent issue with with authors that we are publishing i mean we can be a little quicker but i think in a way there's something healthy about it because it allows you as the writer to to forget about the book because i mean i'm already on the fourth version of the next one so i mean i'm by the time it comes around you know but by the time it gets to be the time to do the publicity for Never Anyone But You, I'll be able to look at it as if someone else wrote it and start to have ideas about it in a way that I wouldn't if I was really close.

So in some ways I find it works for me. Sorry, I've got a crack on. And the book we're talking about with Rupert today is Patrick Modiano's 1990 novel, although first translated into English in 1992, Honeymoon. Voyage de Noces, is that right? Nos. Nos, thank you. It's not Italian, is it?

It's not Voyage of the Nuts. Although, although. Anyway, we'll start where all such shows have to start, Andy, with the immortal question, what have you been reading this week? So I've been reading a book this week that I am not going to reveal the title of, nor the author, and I'm not doing that to be arch. I will explain why. We don't hate books much on Backlisted. That is not a thing we do. We tend to be enthusiastic, at best slightly sceptical. I read a novel in the last week which I absolutely hated and I haven't

disliked a book as much as I disliked this book for a really long time. And it's a classic. It is one of the Guardian's 100 best novels. Are you able to say what the last book you most hated was? I will show that hand in a moment. I feel you're being a little harsh on this book. I just feel instinctively already. Yeah, exactly.

I think you're shouting this book down. I want to leap to the defence of this completely unknown. The thing is, when I went into this book, I was really looking forward to it. I had read short stories by this author, which I had really liked. And I thought, OK, well, I'm going to read this novel. It's extremely well thought of. It is set in an era which I'm very interested in.

So I went into it with really high expectations. And I didn't merely dislike it. I really hated it. I couldn't merely dislike it I really hated it I couldn't believe how bad it was and the problem that I had was and this is what I wanted to talk about you can't like everything as a person you can't like everything but what do you do when you are faced with something that has a great critical reputation I could find many people who would be who would stand up and passionately support this book where you just have a kind of allergic reaction to it.

Did you read the whole thing? Yes, I always. You forced yourself all the way to the end. I always finish. So did it get worse and worse? I found it unbearable on page one and then it stayed consistently unbearable to the bitter end. Clearly, the point I'm trying to make is, I'm wrong.

I'm wrong. Clearly, there's a weight of critical opinion that suggests that this is a very good book, but for whatever reason, I'm totally blind to it. It's so odd that you... I don't get that as often with books as I do with movies. I remember being utterly bemused by everybody. Do you remember Diva?

Yes. Triumph of style in the content. And Betty Blue. I just thought it was utter, I mean, sort of offensive rubbish. Yeah. Whereas I very rarely get that with a book. No, fortunately this doesn't happen to me very often. What about people?

It doesn't happen very often, does it, where you get that absolute chemical ab reaction? The other thing is that I found... You know, I go around talking in my lecture about how... You have to give things a chance. Yes, you have to give things a chance. And if you read Middlemarch and you don't like Middlemarch, that isn't Middlemarch's fault, etc.,

and that you need to try harder. But the result of reading this book was I just found it a very depressing experience, because it made me think, oh, I'm not very good at reading. I'm clearly an idiot, because this is transparently awful, the prose of... Can I just read a bit here? Yeah, OK. OK. So, since how long?

How long had it been raining? An hour ago, perhaps, what had been being said had become not necessary. The rasping, wordy battle might have been quieted before now. London itself gave out the feeling of having been alleviated for some time. Nothing went Elmer out there but that lulling fall and that sighing silence under the breast of which late night traffic only gave out a stifled deeper sigh. The total dark of the city became tonight as unprecautionary, natural as that

of rocks, woods and hills on which elsewhere rain fell. The peacefulness of this outcome of the late evening's tense massed warlike clouds was the one thing astonishing. Now, in effect, the war became as unmeaning as the quarrel. Two persons speechlessly at a window became as anonymous as the city they overlooked. These two, though fated to speak again, could be felt to be depersonalised speakers in a drama which should best of all have remained as silent as it essentially was. Now,

that is not untypical. It is written in that register throughout. I am not, I tried to do that as neutrally as I could. No, I genuinely, no exaggeration, I Do you remember I read Finnegan's Wake? Yeah, I remember when I read Finnegan's Wake? Yeah, I know.

I enjoyed Finnegan's Wake more. That's not an exaggeration. It's a factually accurate statement. I got more out of Finnegan's Wake than I got out of this book. God, is it? I just found it depressing because I kind of thought, you read and you read and you try and you make the effort and you want to engage, and yet when it comes down to it, if you don't like peanut butter,

no amount of eating peanut butter is going to make you like peanut butter, in theory. And you just have these allergies that you can't process. I'm just fascinated about how we deal with that as readers. John, do you feel like you've read that book? It feels like a... I don't know. It's got a weird... I feel like I haven't read it. If I tell them what it is, will you bleep it so we can hear their reaction? Can we do a little bit of a guessing? Is it set in the first half of the 20th century?

Written in the first half of the 20th century? Yes. Oh, God. It's not... I'm going to reveal it to the room now. Ah! God. That's interesting. I wish who I haven't read.

I was just so disappointed, but I'm not disappointed in the author, because it's not the author's fault. I'm just disappointed in my own reaction to it. I would have loved to have enjoyed it. Do you think... And I'm baffled at the extent to which I found it so offensive.

Here's an interesting thing. I've been fascinated by what happened with Salter and you didn't much like Sport in the Past. I did not. I liked it a lot more when I read it again for all the reasons that we put in the podcast. You definitely seem to be more

having Rowan and I be quite passionate and and uh and kind of pro sort of a bit like perhaps my understanding and feelings of sympathy for Rosamund Lehman which were already quite high we're sort of hugely enhanced by having you and as there's something there's some odd thing that happens when almost like a phatic communication that happens around books when you listen to somebody and suddenly connections get made that you might not if you're just doing it on your own as it were yeah i agree there are certain writers that really divide people and and salter is actually one of them because i i assumed that i was i was right when I thought that he was a wonderful writer

and I thought that anyone with taste would think the same thing. And I had some good people, some good contemporary writers to back me up, like Sarah Hall and Kirstie Gunn. They're all fans. And then I started talking to my US publisher about him and she said, that stuff is disgusting. And she sort of meant disgusting in the French sense, and she's Belgian,

and so she meant sort of dégoutant. You know, she meant, you know, it was almost a moral, it was a kind of a moral judgment. And I've since read, you know, this kind of feminist school of criticism that have taken against him understandably yeah understandably yeah but i just yeah i just for you love the stories

yeah i love the stories the sorts of stories and um i love the stories of the author we've just mentioned but um but uh but clearly this not this novel wasn't for me. But that's as... The thing is, not liking books is part of the fun of liking reading. But actually, John, what you were just saying is entirely correct. I think that disliking a book, you know, passionately and eloquently, is still, however passionate and eloquent, usually a bit of a cul-de-sac. And actually, it's far more enlightening Still, however passionate and eloquent, usually a bit of a cul-de-sac. Yeah. And actually, it's far more enlightening, if you don't like a book,

to listen to the opinions of people who do like it and tell you about why they like it. And I agree with you about Salter, yeah. I mean, Salter, you're right, I didn't much enjoy reading the Salter, but hearing it talked about by people who were able to enlighten me about it definitely increased my my understanding of it you know john what have you been reading this week thank you andy um i've been reading a book which i grazed about 10 maybe even 15 years ago which i've had on my shelf and i've always i must go back and reread it's a book called identity of england by robert coles robert Coles is a historian professor of cultural history at De Montfort University in Leicester and he's also the author most recently of George Orwell English

Rebel which is terrific I had heard of the Orwell book but I never heard of this but I wanted to commend you I wanted to commend you for choosing a truly backlisted title. I'll tell you why. One is that Coles is from the North East, which is where my family are from. And he's the next generation on from the great E.P. Thompson, Richard Hoggart, those kind of writers who've written about working class history. His first book was about Northumbrian folk song called The Collier's Rant, which, again, I'm interested in.

But he wrote this book in 2002, published by OUP. Got fantastic reviews at the time. It's an attempt to understand Englishness. Well, the book is about the conflict in England between the state, the idea of the state, and nationhood. As he says, you can't tell that story sequentially. It's all about the way, as he rather brilliantly says towards the beginning, in the life of nations so much depends on how the past is lined up with the present.

Orwell's English, he wrote it in a way in a kind of dialogue with the 1944 book by George Orwell called The English. Orwell's English and the English of today cannot be compared as if they're two specimens in a box. They can only be explained through a line connecting how they thought about themselves then and how we think about ourselves and them now. Over a much longer time sequence and through a more complex patterns of connection, this is what this book tries to do. And it's brilliant. It explores the two things that the English are obsessed with which is that we have this law we have this state we have parliament we are the mother of parliaments we we haven't got a

written constitution because we kind of but at the same time also the fact that this country was the great big revolution in the 17th century which is the beginning of sort of parliamentary democracy and then the other great revolution which is the industrial revolution and he his thesis is up to around about the time of the second world war there was a kind of a consistency uh about the way the english thought about themselves our deepest sense of identity to do with the idea this is from the book to do with the idea of coming from a particular place and being a particular kind of person with roots and aptitudes and characteristics for so long driven deep into the ground of our being are decaying now from within and it is only a matter of time before they become inserviceable so it just for me was an attempt to take stock of all this stuff at a moment where i sort of feel all those notions of englishness and britishness

and our connection with ideas that are bigger are so in play and it was i could go on for hours there's so many brilliant bits but i picked one out for you andy which i love in the he makes a fantastic comparison about punk he brings a huge cultural range he's a massively interested punk rock he said had many origins in fact not all of them off the street but but at the centre, which it denied it had, it is instructive to compare, you'll love this, Sir Hubert Parry's inaugural address to the English Folk Song Society,

delivered in 1899, with the Sex Pistols lunged to notoriety in the 1970s. At the heart of each was a call for complete unity of expression with emotion. Performance was all, and had to be immediate, direct, untutored, not literary, not derivative, not mimicking, not clever, not American, not phony, but fused with the audience.

When the fusion was right, there was hardly an audience at all. What punk could do, they could do. A, E, G. This is a chord, now form a band. That's brilliant. I love that. So it's full of these kind of focus pulls, and he jumps backwards and forwards in time.

It's a thematic history. The thing I wanted to ask you about this book is post-Brexit. I've had several people say to me, doesn't the Village Green Preservation Society post-Brexit feel a bit Brexity? Which, of course it might, but it doesn't look as conservative in a small scene. Isn't it the fact that it's all the wrong people

who are using that imagery? Yes. I mean, that's the thing. It's not really people like you and me who are using that imagery at the moment. It's other people. It's the Farages of this world. How does it read now? It reads remarkably freshly, except that what's happened since is the division that we talk about.

The people who think about the past and who feel connected to any kind of complex past feel that that alienation, that sort of idea... There's just a really quick paragraph, because we've got to get on to Mariano, but it is necessary that the English continue to remember their history. Peoples remember, therefore they are. But what sort of remembering can it be?

In some ways, remembering past agendas will contradict future ones. This is ironic now. Being part of the European Union, being part of a globalised world, being adaptable and mobile and multilingual and multicultural and open and rational and secular and forward-looking and decentered and amnesiac does not square with the nation as it is it is not possible to imagine a nation as old as this one suddenly forgetting its history simply because it has been asked to do so and it turns out that mr coles was one of the more articulate very pro-brexit and you wouldn't get that because the book is very, very balanced. He's not a little Englander, but I think what he's writing about is a fascinating,

which I think is the battle that is in everybody at the moment, is you want to feel that you're rooted and you come from a culture and you come from things that mean something. But at the same time, you like the idea of being part of an idea which is europe and is he saying john that that um england england or britain is is different to the rest of europe in that sense you know the sense of its own past is deeper somehow or more nostalgic i think he's he's too subtle a historian to make i think what he says is that the memories and the stories that you tell the cultural identity that you create you can't just wish that away i mean he comes from a pretty deep left-wing perspective

you know his criticisms he's brilliant on corbin he said you know corbin's got to get beyond telling apple growers about the virtue of apples which i thought was quite quite funny so this book is called what it's called identity of england which is interesting in itself because I like the fact there's no definite article. And everybody you would expect from Melvin Bragg to Simon Heffer to Linda Colley said it's the best attempt. I'm amazed. Once I started reading, I couldn't stop. I mean, it's just so massive.

Stories we tell ourselves about our national past, that's handy as we go over to Patrick Modiano. Oh, we've got a bit of a departure this year. We've been talking, Unbound, as you know, sponsor the podcast. We've been talking about how can we insert a bit of light marketing into the mix without it being embarrassing.

I probably failed to do that by this introduction. You're putting the wires on the outside. It's like a Richard Rogers introduction. It's like a Richard's Renzo piano of podcastry. Here I come. Anyway, you're about to hear a brief minute on a book that is dear to my heart, one of the best novels I think we've done at Unbound, just published, and I'm talking to you now in, what is it, April 2017.

I hope the war went well. Hope it's okay in the shelter. But anyway, Martine McDonagh's Narcissism for Beginners. Hello, my name is Martine McDonagh, and I'm the author of Narcissism for Beginners. Meet Sonny Anderson, budding author, ex-meth head, neurotic and Shaun of the Dead obsessive, about to tip headlong into adulthood.

Sonny doesn't remember his mother because his father, Guru Bim, kidnapped him at the age of five and took him from his home in Scotland to a commune in Brazil. Since the age of 11 he has lived in Redondo Beach, California with his guardian Thomas, who on his 21st birthday throws his world wildly off course. Armed with five mysterious letters and a list of names and addresses of people to visit, Sonny musters up the courage to leave his troubled past behind and return to the UK to finally learn the truth about his childhood. But is it a truth he really wants?

Narcissism for Beginners is about a journey that Sonny Anderson makes from Redondo Beach in California to the UK, looking for the mother he hasn't seen since he was five years old. Turning 21, not much about me changed, physically speaking. I didn't grow any taller, I didn't grow any fatter. Pinch me and you'll find no additional flesh on these bones. Even if we were the sole survivors of a plane wreck, you wouldn't eat me for dinner. But nothing stayed the same

either. My name grew longer, officially at least, and my bank balance got bigger, much bigger. I have a bona fide Brit passport now and I'm not so sure where home is anymore. Who am I? Good question. I started out as Sunny Anderson. Now my official name is Sunny Anderson Agilast Bim. But I still go by Sunny Anderson. Your son, 21-year-old recovering addict and multi-millionaire, pleased to not meet you. to persuade somebody to buy my book I would refer them to Catcher in the Rye and ask them if they'd liked that because a number of readers have told me that Sunny's voice in Narcissism for Beginners reminds them a little of Holden Caulfield. Narcissism for Beginners by Martine McDonagh is published by Unbound and available at all good to very good bookshops or direct via the Unbound website. The book chat will continue on the other side of this message. Thank you everybody. I hope that didn't intrude too deeply into your listening pleasure.

But now back to the main subject of today's podcast, the extraordinary work of Patrick Modiano and his 1990 novel Honeymoon. So Rupert, when did you first encounter either Honeymoon or Modiano? This has been a lifelong passion actually because really strangely in Eastbourne Public Library there was a shelf of translated French fiction. In the early 70s this was I think I was about 15 when I first pulled Villatrice out of the shelf um that's Modiano's I can't remember where it fits in his it's an early one it's mid 70s mid 70s is it mid 70s his first book was 68

wasn't it yeah in that case maybe it was one. I can't actually remember which one it was, but there were two or three of them there. And along with Modiano at that time, there were also people like François Mauriac and André Gide and Henri de Montelon, you know, these French writers who most people don't read anymore, hardly think about. Well, Gide is an exception.

In fact, I'd like to sort of make an appeal on this podcast. I've often wondered who the librarian was who was responsible for choosing that fiction because it was extraordinary at the time. The more I think about it, the more strange it becomes. It's so slender, isn't it, that thing? It's like the one teacher or the the one bookseller i don't actually have a teacher like that yeah that everyone's supposed to have i think i have this

librarian because whoever this was he or she changed my reading and and inspired me for my entire life in a way wow because i've gone on reading him you know for what 40 years on and off and he's always been there one would have have to say this also would be the basis for a Modiano-esque quest as you went through the records of the Eastbourne Library system to try and identify it. Yes, but I'd have to fail. You'd have to fail, and you'd have to at some point

forget the Eastbourne sunshine and the people in Zimmer frames around you and be possessed by a deep sense of emptiness yeah it would have to take me it would have to take me eight years yeah that's right and then recall at various unlikely points and i would walk the streets of eastbourne and there'd be this palimpsest of my own childhood you know that i'd be walking through at the same time there's a book in that we should also say it seems very odd that one has to say this but we do these days that we're reduced having to make case for public libraries but there's one right there you know the fact that somebody was given a shelf and a small budget to put a few books out and as you suggest massively expand the horizons of someone who happens to take one of those books off the shelf. I mean, when Modiano got the Nobel Prize, which was something I was slightly disappointed by,

because he was still my secret, I felt, even after 35 years. When he got that prize, I was about the only person that anyone knew in the country who liked Modiano. And so I remember several papers called me up immediately and said you know could you respond to this and I'm not a journalist I don't really work as a journalist but I happen to be at home so I um I answered the phone and they I said okay I can probably do that when do you want it thinking you know it would be tomorrow or the next day they said in an hour and a half oh but I did it and I told the story the library story and I sort of did make an appeal

at the end of this little piece to say this kind of thing just wouldn't happen in libraries anymore you can't imagine that can you imagine that? the thing about Modiano winning the Nobel it's harder to think bookshop the state of translated fiction gets worse

we should also say that Patrick Modiano won the Nobel Prize in 2014, at which stage there were only about eight, nine of his 40 or so books available to read in English. Most of them had not been translated. And were we doing this several years? In the last couple of years, many more of them have been translated. And were we doing this several years? In the last couple of years, many more of them have been translated. And there's something strange about that, because he was a phenomenon in France,

a literary phenomenon from very early on. He won the Prix Goncourt, which is their booker, isn't it? Yes, that's right. He won that very early. He won that in 1978. And even his first book won the of Best First Novel Award. So for English-speaking audiences and readers, we've just got a clip now.

This is a clip from Euronews reporting on Modiano's victory, and there's a superb bit of simultaneous translation going on in this, which I would ask you to listen out for. Patrick Modiano meets the media after being awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature. The usually retiring writer said the accolade came as a complete surprise and he was interested to discover why he was chosen. I'm a prisoner when I write.

You cannot be your own reader and you have this confused picture of the when I write. You cannot be your own reader and you have this confused picture of the books you write. So I'm really looking forward to finding out how I won this honour. Much of his writing focuses on the elusive themes of memory, loss and identity. His novels look back to France, particularly Paris during the German occupation. The writer has been cherished in France for years, with only a handful of his novels translated into English. That looks set to change.

And that was very prescient of that young gentleman. I there's been, you know, I would say there's been about 12, maybe 15 of his books have appeared in the last couple of years in English. That's actually a pretty fluent interview, though, for Modiano, apparently. Because I was on this island... Non-portalist. I was on this island off Brittany last summer

called Belle-Île, and I met this woman called Geneviève Gishnet. She's a TV journalist in Paris, and she did cultural programs. And I was thinking about Modigliani for some reason. I said, did you ever interview him? And she said, yes, it was an absolute nightmare because it was just, he would start a sentence five times, and there were all these ellipses.

You know how his novels are full of dot, dot, dots? He speaks in exactly the same way as he writes. So I said, do you know him a bit? And she said, my dog knows his dog. And I went, right. And she said, well, it's just that I live in the same, much later on, she lived in the same area as he did. And their dogs became friends.

And apparently he had this large black poodle that had a bandage, a pink bandage around its leg and I just thought that doesn't sound like Modiano at all except that I remembered I remembered that there are

various dog themes aren't there with Modiano, like the way in which in Pedigree the novel which you know is sorry it's not a novel it's an autobiography it's a sort of it's a memoir I mean it's so it's so slight that it takes about 20 minutes to read I mean it it's very very quick but it's incredibly powerful and he's talking about his mother and he says she was a pretty woman with an arid heart and he goes on to describe his example of her arid heart is not to do with him, it's to do with the dog.

I think it's a chihuahua or chow-chow. Is it chow-chow or chihuahua? She was a pretty girl with an arid heart. Her fiancé had given her a chow-chow, but she didn't take care of it and left it with various people, as she would later do with me. The chow-chow killed itself by leaping from a window. That's it, that's it.

The dog appears in two or three photographs, and I have to admit that he touches me deeply, and that I feel a great kinship with him. That's an amazing illustration of your relationship with a parent. I mean, also the fact that he calls that book Pedigree, as if he's an animal. Yeah, yeah. And of course he has no pedigree because his parents are kind of...

He says later on here, actually, it's interesting, you've identified a bit that really leapt out at me as well. He says here, nothing softened the coldness and hostility she had always shown me. I was never able to confide in her or ask her for help of any kind. Sometimes, like a mutt with no pedigree that has too often been left on its own, I feel the childish urge to set down in black and white just what she put me through with her insensitivity and heartlessness. I keep it to myself and I forgive her. It's all so distant now now i remember copying out these words by leon bloy at school

man has places in his heart which do not yet exist and into them enters suffering in order that they may have existence but in this case it was suffering for nothing the kind from which you can't even fashion a poem now i've got a tenuous link there. Which novel, famous 20th century British wartime novel, begins with its epigraph, is that quote from Léon Bloy? I just don't... Pass. Man has places in hearts that do not yet exist into suffering that they may have existence.

Sounds like a Graham Greene novel. It is Graham Greene. It's The End of the. Sounds like Graham Greene. It is Graham Greene. It's The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. That's the epigraph of that book. But yes, yeah, absolutely. The extraordinary thing about Modiano is that you might think, well, if that's his mother, then surely the father must have...

The father's even worse. Your father's worse. That terrible story about his father, where his father just farmed him out to boarding schools. His brother Rudy dies... Age nine, boarding schools. His brother Rudy dies. Age nine, I think. Age nine, yeah. When Modiano's 11.

And his dad just says to him, as they're driving home, your brother's dead. Yeah. And Modiano always says that the only person he loved from his family was his brother. Was his brother. So that he was completely abandoned with these sort of two monstrous parents. We should talk about this book because it is, as you say, it is mysterious.

Rupert, could you read us a little bit from the book? So we're talking about the style in which Modiano writes. It would be good, I think, to let people hear a little bit of that. I should probably set it up a little bit. I mean, the main character, Jean, the book opens with Jean having flown into Milan

on a stiflingly hot August day, middle of August. So Milan is kind of deserted because the Ferragosto, you know, everyone leaves. And so the city is deserted and sort of sunstruck and he takes refuge in the cool, dark bar of this hotel

near the railway station. And he's just sitting there drinking grenadine, as people do in Modigliano novels. And when he learns that two days earlier, a beautiful young woman committed suicide in that hotel, and it kind of transpires that he had come across this woman when he was in his very late teens, early twenties. So the book is, in a sense, there's two main strands to it. Jean basically disappears from his life. He pretends to be

flying to South America, instead of which he flies to Milan and returns secretly to the northern suburbs of Paris, the 18th arrondissement, I think. And he begins to investigate this woman who committed suicide, who he'd met. So part of what he's doing is recounting his meeting with this woman and her husband slash boyfriend in the early 60s. So the bit I'm going to read is just, he's in the south of France in the early 60s, he's hitching and he gets picked up by this couple. And they kind of take him back to the bungalow where they're staying. And there's kind of something, I mean, they're not very forthcoming. They're quite mysterious. They don't really... They don't make any sense to him.

But he feels, strangely, at ease in their company. Yeah. Well, he feels as if he's one of them, actually. Above us, behind the pines, the villa and its swimming pool were lit up, and I could see silhouettes gliding over the blue mosaic. They have parties every night, Rigo said. They stop us sleeping. That's why we're looking for another house. He suddenly

looked worn out. At the beginning they were always inviting us to their parties, Ingrid said. So we used to turn out all the lights in the bungalow and pretend we weren't there. We'd sit in the dark, Rigo said. One evening they came down to fetch us. We took refuge under the pines over there. Why were they adopting this confidential or even confessional tone with me, as if they were trying to justify themselves? Do you know them, I asked. Yes, yes, a little, he said, but we don't want to see them. We've become savages, she said. Voices were approaching. A little group about 50 metres away was coming along the pine-bordered path.

Do you mind if we put the light out, he asked me. He went into the bungalow and the light went out, leaving us, her and me in the semi-darkness. She put her hand on my wrist. Now, she said, we must talk very quietly and she smiled at me behind us he shut the sliding glass door slowly so as not to make a noise

and came and sat down on the deck chair again the others were very close now just by the path leading to the bungalow I heard one of them keep repeating in a husky voice, but I swear I did, I swear I did. If they come right up to us, we'll just have to pretend to be asleep, he said. I thought of the curious sight we should present to them

asleep on our deck chairs in the dark. And if they tap us on the shoulder to wake us up, I asked, well, in that case, we'll pretend to be dead, she said. It's a key passage in the novel. It's just brilliant. It comes back again and again. It's the best. It's so odd, isn't it, that reading it and having read it the first time along,

again, it's one of those books when you come back to it, it was, I just, it was... I found it very emotional. I found it very powerful being back in that strange, dreamy world, which is also... It has a sort of horrible allegorical quality because there's nothing... There are no Gestapo, there are no arrests, there are no deportations in this book.

No, there are only suggestions. But it's all about dark and light. It's all about summer and winter. He's amazing, Modiano. All the books are about the passage from summer to winter and seasons. He seems to me interesting to be a novelist, again, who I don't think, I think this book is so interesting about getting to that point in your life where you want to disappear I think it's quite difficult for young people to imagine

that I mean I don't know whether it's just me or I'm coming back to it and finding much more in it this time than I did the first time where I I guess I probably thought it was kind of good but slight well there's something I wanted to say about that because the slightness is so interesting because you know his style is really really spare and elliptical and the words feel I don't know they feel as if they're hardly attached to the page you know there's an awful lot of white space on the on the on the on a page of Modigliano's novels and and yet as you say paradoxically there's a huge amount of emotion in there somehow. And I think what you do when you read them is there's a huge amount of filling out you do yourself. He's kind of the opposite of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or William Faulkner,

where there's a massive intensity of detail. And, you know, he kind of does the opposite. And the weird thing when I read this book again, book again, just after Christmas, knowing I was going to do this, was that it didn't read as I remembered it, and I realised what I'd done was I'd sort of filled it all in myself and made my own version. So this time, because I'm a different person, I was doing a different thing. Which, of course, is what he's writing about often in the books,

is what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget, or things that we cannot get back that we would like to remember. I think it's more that. I think the Nobel people sort of talked about him being a technician of memory or something, but actually it's much more about what is forgotten and what cannot be recovered, and the sort of quest for that.

This is why he is using genres like spy fiction and detective fiction and film noir. You know, all these genres are sort of in there. I don't think he's particularly aware of that, and I don't think it's a conscious choice. We were talking about Dawson Wells earlier, and I was really reminded the first time I read Honeymoon of a story about the

screening that Wells held for his film The Lady from Shanghai starring his then wife, well soon to be ex-wife Rita Hayworth The Lady from Shanghai is full of brilliant visual technical stuff with a plot that is extremely difficult to follow

and at the end of the screening, the lights came up and Harry Cohen, the head of Columbia, turned to the room and said, I will give $1,000 to anyone who can tell me the plot of the film we've just watched. And I have to say, and this is a positive thing I say about Honeymoon, the first time I read it, I got to the end of it, I thought, what happened?

But you know what, I just proved that point by my useless introduction to the reading because it's incredibly hard to set this book up I've realised there are sort of basically three strands to it what Jean does in the present day disappearing from his own marriage

and discovering that his wife is not actually having an affair with the person he thought she was she's having an affair with someone else. But then you've got the meeting with Ingrid and Rigo and that time. Then you've got his imaginary recreation of that time 20 years earlier during the occupation. That's what's so fascinating.

When I reread the book, I went through and made a note of the shifts in time in a 120-page book. There are nine of them. Yeah, he goes from first person to third. And also, with no explicit way, there's a fascinating thing he does, I think the thing you're talking about, Rupert, where the narrator refers to his notes. He says, these are notes that I kept ten years ago,

which I'm looking at now in the present. But he then presents those notes as clearly fictionalised accounts of Ingrid and Rigo's activities It's as real as anything he's doing More realised and motivated and understood because he hasn't experienced

There's this wonderful thing in one of his books where Modiano says of a character he says that he had a memory that preceded his birth. And Modiano is a bit like that. He's a writer who was born in 1945 and yet

the occupation, everything he writes really is kind of rooted in the occupation of Paris. And that's before he was born. And it's somehow more real to him than anything that happened subsequently rereading again you just realize that sort of something that french literature does that almost nothing else does that thing of standing and looking at a building and feeling that sort of sartrean your sudden you know emptiness you know enters the soul and you're

kind of trying to you're imagining all the lives that took place. That strange passage in Honeymoon, that passage where he finds Rigo's flat and takes it. And moves in. And moves in, and there's sort of objects that... And there's the skis leaning against the wall, which he's imagined earlier on Rigo using. That thing with the buildings, that's very present in Dora Bruda, which is translated as the search warrant here.

The idea of looking at the buildings and thinking to oneself, it was in this geographical location that these things happened. But everyone wants to forget. And it couldn't be recreated and it couldn't be brought back. And yes, it happened. Then there's a resonance of it in the room and there's a resonance. Yeah, absolutely. This morning I googled a couple of the locations i mean one that he uses in honeymoon and the other that he uses in dora bruda and the search warrant and you know one is is then is port de clignancourt

which is north paris beyond the gardien nord and the other one is sort of southeast paris near port d'oreille and the weird thing about both of them is that the periphery it's cut through both those areas okay and so those areas have kind of been destroyed it's such a there's a lovely bit here where he he's the ingrid the woman who commits suicide who he who picks him up he's writing in a fairly ineffectual way her biography. I felt a vague twinge of remorse. Has a biographer the right to suppress certain details under the pretext that he considers them superfluous?

Or do they all have their importance? He must present them one after another, impartially, so that not a single one is left out out as in the inventory of a distraint unless the line of a life once it has reached its term purges itself of all its useless and decorative elements in which case all that remains is the essential the blanks the silences and the pauses i finally fell asleep turning all these serious questions over in my mind. It's just... We were talking about

how hard it is to sum up the narrative of the book. Here's how not to do it. Even the person who wrote the blurb on this, otherwise... Well, it's clearly struggling. I'm going to read it out as best i can jean is seen off from paris by his wife and friends on a flight

to brazil to make a documentary but he never gets to rio he goes to ground in paris instead as he pursues an obsessive quest to piece together the life of a woman he had met only briefly on the Côte d'Azur many years before. Ingrid's story, which ended when she took her life one sultry August day in a Milan hotel, effectively began when, as a 16-year-old student dancer in Paris during the occupation, she chose one snowy winter's evening to stay out after the curfew instead of returning to her father and disappear. She was offered refuge by a young man who became her lover in honeymoon modiano skillfully cross cuts between these two stories of disappearance that of the middle-aged jean caught between his unsettled family life

and his new clandestinity and that of ingrid now dead and yet still so palpably present who had offered jean a brief refuge in a riviera beach house years ago when he was a lone youngster sharply evoking people places and atmosphere the author has written an absolutely haunting tale i mean i love absolutely haunting absolutely haunting tale you, the thing is, it's very... Actually, one of the things about Modiano is he is... In fact, he probably won the Nobel Prize because he repeats himself. Yeah.

That he himself... Modiano world. It's the same book. Well, he's like Faulkner or Alice Munro in that sense. He has his territory and he returns obsessively. He says, there's an interview here that he gave to the New York Times, there are often refrains, things that come back, but they're not really the same.

It's like a photographer who tries to capture someone from different angles and it's not quite coming out right. He takes a shot from one angle, and then he hesitates, and he takes another from a different angle. And I read elsewhere in an interview where he was saying every time he writes a book, he thinks this is the one where I get it. And at the end he thinks, no, it got away from me again, but maybe next time I'll...

He was hugely influenced, apparently, by this. Have you read this? He was hugely influenced by this book by a kind of Nazi hunter type called Serge Klaasfeld, who wrote something called The Memorial of the Deportation of Jews in France. And apparently that book is literally just 80,000 names and addresses of Jews who disappeared. And Guadagno, I think, read this in 78 or something. And after that, he said he doubted literature because he thought that is sort of doing what he's doing.

I think that's what's so extraordinary about him. Because if you go to The Search Warrant, which is technically a novel, I suppose, but not really. More in the way that it reminded me most of Sebald. It's the most Sebald-like. Yes, I agree. The kind of the journey, the obsessive attention to detail, the telling of real life stories by...

I think he's approaching from a non-fiction angle, but then it edges into fiction. But you can't... What you realise from The Search Warrant, which the reason he wrote Honeymoon was the discovery angle but then it edges into fiction you can't what you realize from the the search for which the reason he wrote honeymoon was the discovery of this short advert about a jewish girl in 1942 called dora bruda whose father had put in a an advert saying she had disappeared with a very precise description yeah and he became so haunted by this detail that he wrote the novel Honeymoon

to some degree to exercise or explain what happened. So the Dora Bruder becomes the Ingrid in the book. But then he goes back some years later to write the search warrant. It's almost like he can't... Using her actual name. Using her actual name and doing actual research. And that whole thing about the biography,

do you put all the details in or do you... Somebody said about him that the comparison to Proust is made quite a lot, but saying, you know, in a sense, these aren't separate books, they're chapters in one book. A book that starts with his first novel, Place d'Etoile, and ends with Dora Bruder. That Dora Bruder is like the...

The fiction is falling away by that point as he tries to deal with what you were talking about, Rupert, which is trying to say, well, what is the difference between what I am doing and, on the other hand, just providing a list of 80,000 names? What is the... What space can I occupy? That's where he becomes... You know, the thing is, it's not, as I say,

explicitly political, but that's where he becomes such an important, you know, the novelist of collective memory. His father, although obviously a ratbag, was from a Sephardic Jewish background. He didn't know that, though, did he, Modiano, until he was about 18 or 19? And then he became obsessed.

When 76,000 people were rounded up and deported in Paris, how did his father... So it's that complicated relationship. He kind of resents deeply both his parents, but can't get them... I mean, it's like a massive, long... His father was so complicated because his father was a Jewish collaborator.

A collaborator, a black marketeer, and his mother was an actress. I have got a special treat for you both. When I was researching this morning, I discovered two wonderful facts about Modiano, which I don't think are widely known. The first is that he co-authored a book with Catherine Deneuve. That I don't know, but I better know the second one. OK, so he co-authored a book with Catherine Deneuve

about her sister, Françoise Doliac, the actress... She was in Polanski's movie. Yeah, and she's also in Jacques Demier's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort with Catherine Deneuve. I think I was in love with her when I was 16. She was killed in a car crash in the 1960s. So who do you call upon to help you write a book about memory, about your missing sibling, Ferdinand?

Apache Modiano. The second... Songs. So... Yes, I know about the songs. Modiano wrote songs for Francois Zardy. Yeah, all right. My father's favourite singer

we have a clip now from a song entitled Je fais puzzle I do jigsaw puzzles so let's just listen this is a a little sliver of Modiano's work which is not

much, let's just hear a bit of that now. So, right, so I was listening to that and I was telling John that you were sceptical when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize. You know, anyway, I listened to that this morning and I thought, you know what, listening to the lyrics, they do seem very Modiano-esque. So I have translated them.

Oh, brilliant. This is a piece of Modiano's, we were talking about the English translations of his work. This is the first time. Ladies and gentlemen, translated on air. This has never been translated into English before. But listen to it, because the words are so... If I asked you which novelist wrote these words,

you might guess my honour, right? He had December eyes and a July smile. He spoke tender words in winter as in summer. Every evening, every evening I do jigsaw puzzles. Every evening, every evening I do jigsaw puzzles. Every evening, every evening, I feel truly alone. He had London ways of promising me Corfu. That's genius. But in sun or shadow, I followed him anywhere.

Every evening, every evening, I do jigsaw puzzles. Every evening, every evening, I feel truly alone. When I had black thoughts, he painted them all in blue, this slightly uncanny blue that I found in his eyes. Every evening, every evening, I do jigsaw puzzles. Every evening, every evening, I feel truly alone. He sailed away without telling me where he was going. In a few light years, he told me he would return. Every evening I do jigsaw puzzles. Every evening I feel truly alone. Isn't that amazing?

That's so like a Modiano. Only the French tradition of chanson could you... Are you sure that's not on the Petula Cloud Beat? I'm not sure, no. That's season thing, but also all the light, the imagery of light in the book. You know, the patches of light in Milan, but then the dark patch.

Because do you remember the man? He talks about it and you have this idea of something that's darker than the darkness around it, which is, you know, if you were going to come up with a good metaphor for what was happening. So, Rupert, if we... Also, can I just ask, last... Raymond Canot tutored him in geometry.

Yes, yeah. Which I think is different. Well, Canot took him under his wing, didn't he? He tells a story about his wedding in 1970 where the two stewards at the wedding were Queneau and Andre Malraux who had an argument about something during the course of the wedding. I love the thing teaching him.

Also, you have to say that early pictures of Modiano moodily in his kind of leather trench coat. With the almost shoulder length black hair. Yeah, it was pretty good. He was pretty much your ideal early 60s. Only the cigarette missing. So before we wind up, Rupert, is Honeymoon a good starting point for Modiano?

Or do you think you have to read several before going back? I think it's a good starting point. I mean, you know, most of, as we've suggested, I think, most of what he does is in there. I mean, I happen to really love the the early ones Night Rounds, Wing Road I'm not so happy with some of the recent translations that's all in fact I always had the idea that I would

brilliant translation Honeymoon I think is why I return to it all the time because it's just excellent so you hardly put the foot wrong Barbara Wright Villatrice i've just been reading again um yes andora bruder is kind of i think you have to read because it's probably the most in a sense it's the it's the purest yeah it's the purest expression i read adora bruder

when i was in paris in fact before christmas and i found it very, very affecting, I must say. I found it very, very moving. It's the book that's most devoid of his atmospherics, of his traditional, you know, the traditional things that he does. A lot of that's missing in that book, and I think it's even more powerful for that. Yes, I agree. This is from Dora Bruda. It sort of captures the whole spirit of that book

and that it's a more explicit book in some ways. A father tries to find his daughter notifies a disappearance at a police station and a missing notice is inserted in an evening newspaper but the father himself is wanted the parents lose all trace of their daughter and on 19th of march one of them disappears in their turn as if the winter that year was cutting people off from one another muddying and wiping out their tracks to the point where their existence is in doubt and there is no redress the very people whose job it is to search for you are themselves compiling dossiers the better ensure that once found you will disappear again this time time for good. Oh, that's perfect. Well, John, that seems... I think that is obviously a point at which to stop.

Huge thanks to Rupert for an amazing tour of the world of Modiano, obviously to Matt Hall, our producer, and thanks again to our sponsors, Unbound. You can get in touch with us in all the usual places, at BacklistedPod on Twitter, facebook.com forward slash BacklistedPod, and on the page on the Unbound site at unbound.co.uk or.com forward slash Backlisted. If you listen to us on iTunes, it would be great if you could leave a review on our page. But thank you for listening.

We'll be back with another show in a fortnight. Until then, goodbye. Every evening, every evening, I feel truly alone. You can choose to listen to Backlisted with or without adverts. If you prefer to listen to it without adverts, you can join us on our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted, where you also get bonus content of two episodes of Locklisted, the podcast where we talk about the books and films and music

that we've been listening to over the last couple of weeks.